Tom Shutt in Perth

By Anne Cochrane

Read yesterdays post on Tom Shutt here if you haven’t already

Whenever we are contacted with enquiries about past players, often early pros, we try our best to help as we usually learn a lot ourselves.

So we were keen to help when Richard Miller, who is researching cricket in Perth, Scotland, asked us if we could let him have a photo of Tom Shutt, one of our best ever players, who spent two seasons there as a pro in 1897/8.

We were able to find a decent image in the 1911 League handbook, when he was pro for Rishton, thanks to the crickethistory.website. In return, Richard sent us a photo of the Perthshire team of 1897, which he could now confirm included Tom.

This photo of the Perthshire CC team of 1897 is a great rarity for both Perthshire and Lowerhouse. Photography at that time was still unusual anyway, but like Lowerhouse, Perthshire CC lost their early records in a fire, only in their case it was because Suffragettes torched their Pavilion in 1913. We had until now only one actual photo of any Lowerhouse players before WW1 and whilst this is not our team, it is a photo of one of our legendary players in his prime.

Tom Shutt is standing on the far left. Bare headed and clean shaven, relaxed and looking steadily at the camera, frowning slightly. This photo was taken 125 years ago, but brings him to life, in a way grainy newspaper images and stats can never do. How modern he looks.

The job as pro at Perthshire was profitable and prestigious, and at that time paid much better than being an English county player, let alone an ordinary working man.  On top of a good wage, Tom was given an annual benefit collection, at a big game attended by thousands, which brought him the equivalent of several thousand pounds each time. So his two seasons there will have set him up nicely, financially.

Cricket was just as popular in Scotland as it was in Lancashire when our own League was developing. Richard tells us that Perthshire CC continued to attract ambitious young pros even into the 1990’s when both Adam Gilchrist and Justin Langer were club pros.

Tom was not retained after the two seasons, but was very popular, and his career continued to be followed in the local press.  Richard has written us a lovely article on how he came to be looking for Tom, and the history of cricket in Perth.  We would like to thank him for adding significantly to our Tom Shutt archive.