| 1886 Tom Horan - Our First Test Captain |
Tom Horan was one of Victoria and Australia's leading cricketers during early tours of England, having played in the first ever Test Match in March, 1877, top-scoring in Australia's second innings.
He toured England with Australia sides in 1878 and 1882, but declined offers to visit the old country in 1884 and 1886 because of family responsibilities after his marriage in 1879.
Tom Horan played football at the senior level with South Melbourne in 1883 and later became famed as a cricket writer using the pen name of "Felix" in the widely read weekly Melbourne journal, "The Australasian" as well as the leading daily, "The Argus" for over thirty years. (Despite his later fame, some historians suggest that his writing " was so impartial and objective that few of his cricketing contemporaries actually knew that Horan was the author of the articles penned under the name of "Felix").
Horan captained Australia on two occasions and in all played 15 Tests in days when an average tour only involved a couple of test matches.
Horan's name appeared with the Gowerville Football Club in 1885 and it and the Preston club merged late in 1885, "T. Horan" appeared as captain in 1886 and 1887 and receiving a dinner service as "best all round player" in the former year.
The link comes, not through football, but via the cricket field.
Surviving records of an annual meeting on September 13, 1883 show "our" T. Horan led the batting averages of the Gowerville Cricket Club for the 1882-83 season, but had played just three games and was excluded from the award under the club's rules. Horan averaged 18 which seems a modest return from someone who may have played Test cricket, but we are talking uncovered dirt wickets and his figures were in fact nearly three times that of the eventual award winner, John White with an average of just 6.4 over 18 matches.
Runs, just like the money, were more valuable then!
Horan was also listed as taking out a prize for batting the following year; again, the name appears irregularly in the match reports remaining and it is not clear whether the rules on the number of games played was eased or he actually played in a number of unreported matches.
There is no trace of Horan playing after the 1883-84 season, but undoubtedly this is the same man who captained the football club.
He retired from Test cricket following the 1884/85 season and became the senior cricket correspondent for the prestigious weekly journal, The Australasian, a sister-publication to the daily Argus newspaper. He never attached his own name to his writings, preferring to use the pseudonym "Felix" and it is believed many of his cricketing contemporaries never knew that Horan and "Felix" were one and the same person . Horan continued contributing to The Australasian up until the end of 1914.
"The" Tom Horan was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1854 and is credited as being Australia's first Irish-born Test cricketer. After arriving in Australian he was brought up in North Fitzroy where he was educated at the Bell Street State School.
The Horan name appears in reports of the Gowerville Football Club in 1885 and then Preston in 1886 and 1887 but wasn't sighted the following year, the captain then being Alf Vaughan who tragically died in August of that year.
Was it coincidence the Tom Horan as "Felix" toured England in his role as a journalist during the winter of 1888, the same time "our" Horan disappeared from the Preston Football Club?
An examination of the surviving scores of the Gowerville club from the 1882-83 and 1883-4 seasons further supports our claim for Horan.
What may surprise many people is that cricket, generally accepted as a "traditional" game and with intercolonial and international matches well established lagged a long way behind football when it came to an organised local competition. Despite a couple of attempts to form cricketing associations to formalise a competition within Melbourne, the concept of regular District cricket as we know it know did not come into being until 1906, and for much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, the local cricketers had to make do with irregular Challenge Cup and other arranged matches.
(In fact, the junior clubs with their annual meeting to arrange matches were better off than their more senior counterparts. Although there were problems of teams disbanding mid-season or occasionally not turning up, most clubs managed between 18 and 22 one-day games - the "senior" sides would probably have been happy to play six two or three-day matches).
This oddity of fixturing meant that many of our leading cricketers had several Saturdays free during the season, and with time on their hands, many turned to junior games to keep their eye in. An examination of nine reports during 1882-83 and 1883-4 where individual performances are shown for Gowerville reveals that the name of Horan appeared four times.
On none of those days did "the" Tom Horan play for East Melbourne, Victoria or Australia. Yet four other occasions where name does not appear with Gowerville, Horan is noted as playing in matches for one of these three "senior" teams.
That leaves just one day in which Horan's name does not appear either with Gowerville or with a senior team; perhaps he had the day off, or perhaps didn't distinguish himself enough with Gowerville to rate a mention.
To confuse the issue, one account of Horan's life suggested he had a younger brother regarded as highly promising cricketer, but who died at a young age, but if this was the player with the Gowerville cricket club, why did he play so infrequently? The name of John C. Horan also appears in several newspapers promoting a sporting club, possibly this was the younger brother
Tom Horan had two sons, Tom junior and Jim who were also fine players with Victoria, and the link to the northern suburbs remains with Tom junior appearing in the first-ever Collingwood pennant side in 1906.
 | Whether he ever lived in the Preston area is not known. Tom Horan died in Malvern on April 16 1916, and was noted as having been a resident of Kew at the time of his passing. "As Felix, he wrote of cricket, but of something more than cricket, and in all his years of writing never said an unkind or an ungracious thing. There was that in his writing which made an appeal more human than cricket …" The Australasian, April 22 1916 (Tom Horan pictured at the M.C.G. in the 1890s) |