Frederick Lillywhite (1829 - 1866) was a sports outfitter and cricketing entrepreneur, who organised the first overseas cricket tour by an English team and published a number of reference works about cricket.

Cricketing dynasty

Lillywhite was born in Hove

Hove

Hove is a town on the south coast of England, immediately to the west of its larger neighbour Brighton, with which it forms the unitary authority Brighton and Hove. It forms a single conurbation together with Brighton and some smaller towns and villages running along the coast...

, Sussex

Sussex

Sussex , from the Old English Sūþsēaxe , is an historic county in South East England corresponding roughly in area to the ancient Kingdom of Sussex. It is bounded on the north by Surrey, east by Kent, south by the English Channel, and west by Hampshire, and is divided for local government into West...

 on 7 July 1829. He was the third son of (Frederick) William Lillywhite

William Lillywhite

Frederick William Lillywhite was a famous English cricketer during the game's roundarm era...

 (1792-1854), the Sussex bowler known as the "Nonpareil" ("unrivalled"); younger brother of the batsman and umpire John Lillywhite

John Lillywhite

John Lillywhite was an English cricketer during the game's roundarm era....

 (1826-74); and cousin of James Lillywhite

James Lillywhite

James Lillywhite was a first-class and Test cricketer and umpire. He was the first ever captain of the English cricket team in a Test match, captaining 2 Tests against Australia in 1876-77, losing the first, but winning the second.Lillywhite was born in Westhampnett in Sussex, the son of a...

 (1842-1929) who captained England

English cricket team

The England and Wales cricket team is a cricket team which represents England and Wales. Until 1992 it also represented Scotland. Since 1 January 1997 it has been governed by the England and Wales Cricket Board , having been previously governed by Marylebone Cricket Club from 1903 until the end...

 in the first Test match

Test cricket

Test cricket is the longest form of the sport of cricket. Test matches are played between national representative teams with "Test status", as determined by the International Cricket Council , with four innings played between two teams of 11 players over a period of up to a maximum five days...

 played against Australia

Australian cricket team

The Australian cricket team is the national cricket team of Australia. It is the joint oldest team in Test cricket, having played in the first Test match in 1877...

 in Melbourne

Melbourne Cricket Ground

The Melbourne Cricket Ground is an Australian sports stadium located in Yarra Park, Melbourne and is home to the Melbourne Cricket Club. It is the tenth largest stadium in the world, the largest in Australia, the largest stadium for playing cricket, and holds the world record for the highest light...

 in 1877.

Early business activities

Fred and John Lillywhite, as well as their elder brother, James (b.1825), all went into business as sports outfitters. Perhaps because of this multiplicity of Lillywhites, latter day accounts of their non-cricketing activities sometimes conflict as to who did what. What is clear is that Fred was a manager, probably from 1848 to 1855, in the firm of Lillywhite Brothers, a tobacconist and sports outfitter in Islington

Islington

Islington is a neighbourhood in Greater London, England and forms the central district of the London Borough of Islington. It is a district of Inner London, spanning from Islington High Street to Highbury Fields, encompassing the area around the busy Upper Street...

, then on the outskirts of London .

The Lillywhites' father died in 1854 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery is a cemetery located in north London, England. It is designated Grade I on the English Heritage Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England. It is divided into two parts, named the East and West cemetery....

, North London. The following year Fred went into partnership with the Sussex all-rounder, John Wisden

John Wisden

John Wisden was an English cricketer who played 190 first-class cricket matches for three English county cricket teams, Kent, Middlesex and Sussex...

 (1826-84), with whom he established a tobacconist and outfitter in New Coventry Street, near Leicester Square, in the West End of London. This partnership did not survive the tour to the United States and Canada in 1859 that Lillywhite (though not himself a player) organised and of which Wisden was a prominent member.

By 1860 James Lilywhite (the elder brother) was cricketing coach at Cheltenham College

Cheltenham College

Cheltenham College is a co-educational independent school, located in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England.One of the public schools of the Victorian period, it was opened in July 1841. An Anglican foundation, it is known for its classical, military and sporting traditions.The 1893 book Great...

, Gloucestershire, where he also ran an outfitters. John Lillywhite, who had also joined the 1859 tour, was then running a cricketing warehouse near Euston Square, London. This was the forerunner of the present Lillywhites

Lillywhites

Lillywhites is a sports retailer based at Piccadilly Circus, London, United Kingdom. It is currently a division of Sports Direct International.-History:...

, established in Haymarket in 1863, that, following its acquisition in 1922 by I H Benedictus, moved to the Criterion site in Piccadilly Circus

Piccadilly Circus

Piccadilly Circus is a road junction and public space of London's West End in the City of Westminster, built in 1819 to connect Regent Street with the major shopping street of Piccadilly...

 in 1925.

The Guide to Cricketers

In 1848 (still not 20) Fred Lillywhite had produced the first edition of his The Guide to Cricketers

The Guide to Cricketers

The Guide to Cricketers was a cricket annual edited by Fred Lillywhite between 1849 and his death in 1866. The title varied somewhat but was generally along the lines of The Guide to Cricketers...

which was published until the year of his death in 1866. This was, in many respects, the forerunner of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack is a cricket reference book published annually in the United Kingdom...

, founded by John Wisden in 1864, which has since been published annually, reaching its 100th edition in 1963 and 148th in 2011.

In 1865 the Marylebone Cricket Club

Marylebone Cricket Club

Marylebone Cricket Club is a cricket club in London founded in 1787. Its influence and longevity now witness it as a private members' club dedicated to the development of cricket. It owns, and is based at, Lord's Cricket Ground in St John's Wood, London NW8. MCC was formerly the governing body of...

 withdrew its support for Lillywhite's Guide. This falling out with the cricketing establishment seems to have arisen from the trenchancy of some of Lillywhite's observations. Significantly, in 1866, Wisden noted that "John Wisden & Co have avoided making remarks upon the play or players".

In the 1865 edition Lillywhite proposed that the standard height of the wicket should be raised from 27 inches to "28, 29, or even 30 inches out of the ground" to help avoid what he regarded as excessively high scores. This recommendation was implemented over sixty years later, in 1931, when the height was increased by an inch and the stumps were also widened .

Tour of the US and Canada (1859)

The touring party of 1859 left Liverpool on the SS Nova Scotian on 7 September and returned on 11 November. Its members, in addition to Wisden and John Lillywhite, were the captain George Parr

George Parr (cricketer)

George Parr was an English cricketer, whose first-class career lasted from 1844 to 1870....

 (1826-91), Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar (cricketer)

Julius Caesar was a Surrey cricketer who played 194 first-class cricket matches between 1849 and 1867.-Childhood:...

 (1830-78), William Caffyn

William Caffyn

William "Billy" Caffyn was a famous English cricketer who played for Surrey CCC and the All-England Eleven.-Surrey and All-England:...

 (1828-1919), Robert Carpenter

Robert Carpenter (cricketer)

Robert Pearson Carpenter was a noted English cricketer and umpire.A right-handed batsman and occasional wicket-keeper, he played for Cambridgeshire during its brief period as a first-class county in the 1850s and 1860s, as well as for the United All-England Eleven...

 (1830-1901, Alfred Diver

Alfred Diver

Alfred John Day Diver was an English cricketer whose career spanned the 1843 season to the 1866 season...

 (1824-1876), James Grundy (1824-1873), Tom Hayward

Thomas Hayward (cricketer)

Thomas Hayward was a Cambridgeshire and All-England Eleven cricketer who was generally reckoned to be one of the outstanding batsmen of the 1850s and 1860s. In the early 1860s, he and Robert Carpenter, his Cambridgeshire colleague, were rated as the two finest batsmen in England...

 (1835-76), John Jackson

John Jackson (cricketer)

John "Foghorn" Jackson was a Nottinghamshire and All-England Eleven cricketer who was generally reckoned to be the outstanding fast bowler of the 1850s.Born in Bungay in Suffolk, Jackson was affectionately known as "Foghorn"...

 (1833-1910), Tom Lockyer

Tom Lockyer

Thomas "Tom" Lockyer was a famous English cricketer during the game's roundarm era. He was one of the outstanding wicket-keepers of the 19th century.Lockyer was a right-handed batsman...

 (1826-1869) and Heathfield Harman Stephenson (1833-1896), who later led the first private tour by an England XI to Australia in 1861.

Fred Lillywhite travelled with his groundside tent and printing press. His role on the tour has been described as that of "scorer, reporter, and mentor, not to say Nestor

Nestor (mythology)

In Greek mythology, Nestor of Gerenia was the son of Neleus and Chloris and the King of Pylos. He became king after Heracles killed Neleus and all of Nestor's siblings...

" .

The team won all five official matches against a 22 of Lower Canada (by 8 wickets at Montreal, Quebec on 26-27 September), a 22 of the United States (by an innings and 64 runs at Hoboken, NJ on 3-5 October), a different 22 of the United States (by 7 wickets at Philadelphia on 10-12 October), a 22 of Lower Canada (by 10 wickets at Hamilton, Ontario on 17-19 October) and a further 22 of the United States (by an innings and 68 runs at Rochester, NY on 21-25 October).

There were also some exhibition matches and an impromptu game of baseball when a match in New York was interrupted by snow. The team made two excursions to view the Niagara Falls

Niagara Falls

The Niagara Falls, located on the Niagara River draining Lake Erie into Lake Ontario, is the collective name for the Horseshoe Falls and the adjacent American Falls along with the comparatively small Bridal Veil Falls, which combined form the highest flow rate of any waterfalls in the world and has...

.

Lillywhite's detailed account of the tour, The English Cricketers' Trip to Canada and the United States, was published in 1860 and reprinted over a century later, in 1980. There was coverage also in the 13th edition of his Guide to Cricketers and Caffyn gave an account in a memoir, Seventy-one Not Out, published at the end of the century.

Final years

After his break with Wisden, Lillywhite was based at the Kennington Oval, home of Surrey County Cricket Club, from where, in 1862, he published Scores and Biographies, a major reference work about cricket since 1772. He published also various scoring books and sheets, as well as scorecards of matches.

Lillywhite died on 15 September 1866 at the age of 37.