Anniversary story with a tragic end
Shrewsbury and Scotton, team-mates and so much more
The long association between Arthur Shrewsbury and his friend, team-mate and business partner Alfred Shaw is well documented and covered in numerous books, articles and stories.
Less well known are the links and parallels between Shrewsbury and another Nottinghamshire and England cricketer of the ‘Golden Age’, William Scotton. It’s a pairing that goes back more than a century and a half and that has a more than usually poignant conclusion.
They were of the same age, went to the same school and played recreational cricket for the same club. Later they made their First-Class and Test Match debuts together and, tragically, each died by their own hand.
The two were born with a few months of each other in 1856 – William arriving in January at Mount Street in what was then still the town of Nottingham; Arthur being born in April that year at the family home in New Lenton.
They would have first met when pupils at People’s College in Nottingham. Indeed, in his biography of Shrewsbury, Peter Wynne-Thomas calls them ‘classmates’. We don’t know if they played cricket together there but it seems extremely likely – Arthur is definitely recorded as playing for the College v High Pavement at just 11 years old – but their first club was certainly one they shared.
Scotton and Shrewsbury were team-mates at Meadows Willow CC before Arthur went on to the Nottingham Commercial Club. However, they were together when the XXII Nottinghamshire Colts played Nottinghamshire in 1873 and shared a stand of 19; later that summer they opened for Nottinghamshire Next XV, again v Nottinghamshire, when each was bowled by Alfred Shaw.
By March 1875, they had graduated to the Nottinghamshire XI for the match against the Colts, a prelude to their First-Class debuts.
One Hundred and Fifty years ago, on 17 May 1875, Scotton and Shrewsbury made their first team debuts together in a County Championship game against Derbyshire at home. Scotton opened with William Oscroft and was followed to the crease by Shrewsbury when dismissed by Joseph Flint for just six runs. Arthur did a little better, making 17. In the second innings, they made 8 and 10 respectively, not performances to suggest long careers in the game with the highest honours to come their way.
In December 1881, the two Nottinghamshire batters made their Test debuts together, in a timeless, but drawn, test that was the first of the 1881/2 Ashes series, played at Melbourne Cricket Ground.
Scotton had the better start, making a not out 50 in England’s second innings. Although it was Arthur, not William, that would go on to a long international career and many batting records, this does give one claim to fame – it was the first fifty scored in a Test match by a left-handed batter; in fact he scored the first three left-handed Test fifties.
Scotton played 15 Tests, all against Australia and only three in England – the Old Trafford and Lord’s Tests of 1886 and at The Oval two years earlier. He made 510 test runs at 22.17 and a best score of 90, in that Oval Trest of 1884, outscoring not just Shrewsbury (10) but WG Grace, Billy Barnes and all his England team-mates bar Walter Read, who made 117 batting at number ten!
Arthur Shrewsbury was to prove to be the one batter of the age who could stand comparison with Grace and not be diminished by that comparison. Indeed, WG himself is reputed to have said, ‘Give Me Arthur’ when asked his preferred batting partner. That story may be apocryphal but it was good enough for Peter Wynne-Thomas to take it as the title of his book about Arthur.
Shrewsbury went on to play 23 Tests, again all against Australia, and totalled 1,277 runs at 35.47 with a top score of 164, at Lord’s in 1886. In 2023, when Wisden decided to posthumously award the recently defunct Wisden Trophy for individual performances in each Test year, Shrewsbury was awarded the 1886 version for that innings; as the citation says, “Shrewsbury’s 164, in a match where no Australian made 50, clinched the Ashes.”
That was his top Test score but he made seven double hundreds for Notts, including the county’s first, 207 v Surrey at The Oval in 1882.
Although William Scotton was an England international and established county player, it is fair to say that their careers diverged as Arthur forged his reputation as a batter and as a businessman.
He formed the partnership with Alfred Shaw, who had been a Notts regular well before Scotton and Shrewsbury joined the squad, that not only ran a successful sports outfitters on Carrington Street but also saw them organise cricket and rugby tours to Australia. It is now generally accepted that the rugby football tour of 1888, run by Shaw and Shrewsbury, marks the first tour by a British Lions party.
Shrewsbury was a determined and organised businessman and determined cricketer, though still able to flourish with skill and style. ‘His batting’, said The Country Vicar in a 1927 edition of The Cricketer, ‘was the poetry of cricket…with such an air of polish and of mastery’.
No-one ever laid fulsome praise of that order at Scotton’s feet. Though he has some quick scoring and prodigious feats in his time at the crease – including one hit onto the Trent Bridge Pavilion balcony in 1880 – that was uncharacteristic.
His name came to symbolise dour batsmanship. When he made 34 in three and three-quarter hours against Australia – going 67 minutes without a scoring stroke – in the third Test of 1886, the satirical magazine Punch printed a ‘tribute’ to him; it was a pastiche of the Tennyson poem ‘Break, Break’ and began:
Block, block, block
At the foot of thy wicket, O Scotton!
And I would that my tongue would utter
My boredom. You won’t put the pot on!
And concluded:
Block, block, block,
At the foot of thy wicket, ah do!
But one hour of Grace or Walter Read
Were worth a week of you!
Despite this dour reputation, he continued to play for Notts and in representative cricket; by 1891 it was apparent that he had been dropped by his county – presumably for slow scoring but he was a difficult character and that may have contributed to his departure.
What is clear is that losing his place in the team played on his mind. “He became,” says Peter Wynne-Thomas, “increasingly depressed, his marriage broke up and the happy days of cricket with Arthur Shrewsbury and his other young contemporaries was long gone”.
In 1893 he was in London doing some umpiring and working occasionally at Lord’s. On 8 July he was found in his room by his landlady having cut his own throat – a sad and dramatic end.
An inquest determined that he “died of his own act while of unsound mind.”
Even in death, his obdurate batting style was highlighted. The obituary in Wisden said: “Few left-handed men have ever played with so straight a bat or possessed such a strong defence, but he carried caution to such extremes that it was often impossible to take any pleasure in seeing him play.”
Between 1875-1890, he played 237 First-Class matches, scoring 6,527 runs at 18.97 with 134, made in 1884 for an England XI versus the touring Australians at Huddersfield as his top score (one of four First-Class hundreds). William also took eight First-Class wickets.
By the time of his suicide, Scotton and Shrewsbury had fallen out of friendship, to the extent that Peter Wynne-Thomas observed: “It would appear that Shrewsbury was unaffected by his death as his great hundred at Lord’s in the Gentlemen v Players match was compiled on the Monday, Scotton having died the previous Saturday”.
Shrewsbury’s career statistics show just how far the two had diverged. Arthur played 498 First-Class fixtures, making 26,505 runs at 36.65 – a very healthy average for that era – with 59 centuries and a top score of 267 which, remarkably, he made twice.
The first time was against Middlesex at Trent Bridge in 1887 in a high-scoring draw and he repeated the feat in 1890 at home to Sussex, a match Notts won by an innings and 266 runs.
For all his composure as a cricketer, an organiser and a businessman, Arthur was a complex character. He was notoriously vain and went to great lengths to disguise his early baldness – not even removing his cap when changing in the dressing rooms.
He was also a hypochondriac, something that may have led to his eventual demise. More than once in his playing career he had missed a sequence of matches citing illness even though doctors could find nothing wrong. As the 1902 season ended, Arthur complained of pains in his kidneys and consulted various doctors.
In February 1903 he went to a nursing home for further examination but the specialists could not identify any condition and he returned to Nottingham, to stay in Gedling with his sister Amelia.
Early in May that year, with the cricket season just under way, he bought a revolver and on 19th of that month he shot himself in his bedroom.
An inquest was held the next day and agreed that Arthur Shrewsbury had taken his own life, ‘his mind being unhinged by the fact that he had an incurable disease’. There was, however, no evidence that he was suffering from any major illness.
On the morning of 20 May, the news was telegrammed to the Notts team who were playing Sussex at Hove. As a mark of respect, the game was immediately abandoned and the team returned to Nottingham.
Two fine cricketers who had started their journeys together and played at every level of the game had each brought about their own tragic end.
The difference between the two men at the time of their deaths can be affectingly demonstrated by the final resting place. William Scotton lies in an unmarked grave in Nottingham’s General Cemetery; Arthur Shrewsbury has a grand sarcophagus tomb in the churchyard of All Hallows, Gedling, close by (but not, despite legend, 22 yards) that of his friend and partner Alfred Shaw.
May 2025
Shrewsbury's suitably impressive tomb at Gedling (top) and a wooden peg is all that marks the last resting place of William Scotton in Nottingham General Cemetery