Edward Pooley
Archie Mac |Published: 2023
Pages: 132
Author: Ulyate, Rodney (editor)
Publisher: Private
Rating: 4 stars
If you were to choose a player to write a biography on from the earliest days of Test cricket, then Ted Pooley would be a no brainer. Pooley was a headliner, with his professional career punctuated with controversy. From run-ins with umpires and journalists to allegations of match fixing, Pooley sold copy in his day. Most famously, he missed the inaugural Test match in Australia as he was ‘detained’ in New Zealand after yet another dubious cricket betting incident.
Pooley’s personal life was also incident packed. He left his first family and lived with another woman. Today this would be called a de-facto relationship, in the 1860s this was ‘living in sin’ and was a social taboo. Even to modern eyes, Pooley’s treatment of his first wife and children appears reprehensible. Well before the welfare state, Pooley’s actions left his family in a perilous financial state so dire that they ended up in the ‘work house’. Ironically this fate was to befall Pooley himself in retirement. A combination of ill health and being penurious saw Pooley make his most famous statement, “for me it was either the workhouse or the river”. Some must have thought Pooley chose the river, as a premature obituary was published in newspapers. To paraphrase Mark Twain – reports of Pooley’s death were ‘greatly exaggerated’.
Author Rodney Ulyate titles his book on Edward Pooley as an autobiography. When first reading the book, I assumed Ulyate had taken a couple of long interviews and combined them into one continuous narrative. It wasn’t until the end of the book, when I perused the three page list of sources Ulyate drew from to produce Pooley’s ‘autobiography’, that I realised how impressive his effort is. The narrative flows making it easy to follow the life of Pooley.
The most impressive element of Edward Pooley is the research. Ulyate has tracked down the birth and death years as well as the full names of almost everyone mentioned by Pooley in his reminiscences. So impressive is the research that it was a shock when Ulyate did not supply the real name for the moniker ‘MB’ of The Sporting Life – if Ulyate didn’t discover it then it must be lost to history.
The amount of research by the author can almost be overwhelming, and regularly results in the foot notes claiming more page space then the main narrative. I solved this by reading the narrative of two facing pages, and then going back and reading the foot notes. I imagine that it’s by design that Ulyate finishes most pages with a period on both the narrative and foot notes. After a few pages I was in sync and found the footnotes materially added to the experience of Edward Pooley.
As well as highlighting embellishments and inaccuracies in Pooley’s recall, Ulyate is prepared to criticise previous historians for either apathetic or inaccurate research. He is also prepared to offer strident opinion on the controversies and conditions that impacted the cricket of the Pooley era.
By the end of the book we find the well known author of the time, Fredrick Gale, making a plea in print for a collection for Pooley. By this time Pooley was in the Lambeth Workhouse, and was struggling to make ends meet. In the end a decent sum is raised. This would have been more if it was not for the Surrey CCC finding it necessary to alert the public that they had provided their former county star with a stipend, which they would not continue, the inference being that Pooley had wasted their kind allowance.
The book has some evocative illustrations which include a picture of Pooley’s hands, which look like they’ve been tortured by a meat tenderiser. Eccentrically, Ulyate does not include captions with the illustrations. At the end of the book, he indicates some sort of phobia to including captions. I would suggest some aversion therapy utilising David Frith’s Magnum Opus The Pageant of Cricket, to fix the affliction.
I understand that Ulyate is working on a book about the first Test match in 1877. Given the level of research in Edward Pooley I expect we will discover many new things about a game that most would consider has already been fully described. Given his scholarly efforts with Edward Pooley I can guarantee him at least one sale of Ulyate’s book about the first ever Test.
Edward Pooley is available on Amazon as either a hardback or paperback. Alternatively prospective purchasers can obtain the book from Roger Page and Ken Piesse in Australia or by contacting Rodney directly at rodney.ulyate@gmail.com.
Please find attached a short film teaser on the life of Edward Pooley. Cricket Web would like to thank Rodney Ulyate for the use of this short video.
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