Australian cricket's baggy green cap a journey through its rich history
SportblogAustralia cricket teamThe baggy green is synonymous with Australian Test cricket, but how did it go from being just another piece of kit to a valuable commodity?
Sir Donald Bradman, Richie Benaud and Ian Chappell didn’t hold on to a single one between them, Bill O’Reilly held his so dear that it adorned his casket when he died and having had an image of his first one tattooed onto his backside, Colin “Funky” Miller later sold another at a memorabilia auction. Australia’s baggy green cap, it’s fair to say, has always meant different things to players who have worn them.
The story of its rise to the status of national icon during the captaincy reigns of Mark Taylor and Steve Waugh is now well-established but among the many ironies that surround the relatively newfound deification of Australian cricket’s national cap is that the elaborate rituals that now surround its presentation to debutantes have also served as the primary catalyst driving up its value as a prized commodity in auction houses around the world.
This wasn’t always so. Until the 1988 sale of Clarrie Grimmett’s 1924-25 and 1932-33 Bodyline series caps at a Christie’s auction in South Kensington, no Australian Test cap had previously appeared at high-end auction houses and it wasn’t really until a number of Bradman’s caps appeared in the early 2000s that their stratospheric prices sent former players, their families and acquaintances searching through cupboards and attics.
The real hysteria kicked off back in 2003, when a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? contestant named Tim Serisier paid a reported $425,000 for Bradman’s 1948 Invincibles cap, a mark never bettered and one that came with a few unfortunate riders for the buyer; in the time between that purchase and the cap’s re-sale at a small loss following the global financial crisis, it emerged that Bradman and all of his team-mates on that Ashes tour were actually issued with two caps. Bradman’s spare was subsequently donated to the South Australian State Library by Kevin Truscott, whose father had been gifted the cap by Bradman.
Therein lies an instructive tale about the auction market for baggy green caps. Though the likes of Waugh and some of his contemporaries find it regrettable that any even reach sale rooms, the fact is that until the last two decades, players played under new caps in almost every Test series – often multiples – and in the absence of any memorabilia culture often gave them away to friends, family and acquaintances.
It remains relatively rare for caps to be consigned to auctions by the player who actually wore them, but baggy green expert Michael Fahey told Guardian Australia that somewhere around 250 have been now been sold in auction houses and private sales around the world since the Grimmett caps in 1988. Fahey should know – in 2008 he and veteran cricket writer Mike Coward wrote a fascinating book on the subject, one which brought to attention many of the rich tales surrounding the lives and reappearances of many of them.
The cricket memorabilia market itself is, in the context of the overall high-end auction market for antiques and collectables, relatively young, having for decades been a minority concern for a hardcore group of mostly English-based private collectors. Then came the infamous Phillips sale of 1978 – attended by an array of crusty MCC types but also drawing bids from Rolling Stones pair Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts – which took serious memorabilia beyond the realms of dedicated collectors and eventually drove prices into orbit.
Still, Grimmett’s 1924-25 and 1932-33 Bodyline series caps sold for the equivalent of $640 and $990 when they arrived on the market, figures that might have seemed hefty 27 years ago but could be viewed as steals when you consider that their market value would now easily exceed $30,000 each. Back then blazers, bats and books ruled the market. Now auctions featuring a baggy green cap will invariably carry an image of the famous cap on their catalogue covers and the sale of such caps itself garners media attention, none more so than the flurry of Bradman caps that appeared a decade back.
None of this is to say that the collecting of baggy green caps is always prohibitively expensive nor solely the preserve of the famous and well-heeled. Fahey says that it’s impossible to define the average baggy green buyer; they’re mostly cricket enthusiasts and rarely financially motivated in their purchase and range from schoolteachers and accountants to historians, lawyers and even the odd ex-player. When Keith Miller’s 1956 cap was sold in 2006 the buyer soon gifted it to recently-retired Test opener Justin Langer, a fierce disciple of Waugh’s cult of the baggy green.
When Fahey and Coward published their book eight years ago, collation of sales data since the Grimmett caps appeared was compelling in and of itself; by that point 121 caps had been sold at an average price of $17,254. But there remains two distinct markets when it comes to baggy green sales: Bradman and everyone else.
No price has gone close to the Invincibles cap but the value and eventual sale prices of other Bradman caps were undoubtedly inflated by that one-off bonanza. In this light, the $6,200 paid for his 1947-48 cap in 1995 was a steal because the same one sold eight years later at an undisclosed figure in excess of $180,000 and others have pushed close to six figures; the 1946-47 model fetched $95,400 in 2005; 1930 found a buyer at $95,385 in 2004.
If the prices alone hogged all of the media attention when it came to the Bradman caps, their reappearance also served to highlight some fascinating insights from his personal life and show how generous the cricket great was with items associated with his career. All the caps that appeared on the market had been gifts from Bradman to the owner; the $425,000 Invincibles cap had been given to 12-year-old Derek Robins, son of Bradman’s friend Walter Robins, when he noticed that the boy was playing a backyard Test match in a green cap with a home-made Australian crest stuck to the front; another was handed to a clearly attentive steward on an Orient liner; his 1930 Ashes issue was presented to his golf coach Jack Bahen and others to the Reverend Tim Biles and former Indian team manager Pankaj Gupta.
Just as nobody has gone close to matching his run-making output, no other player’s cap has commanded the same kind of prices as Bradman’s, though healthy sums have been paid for those belonging to Allan Border, virtually any Bodyline combatant and Keith Miller, who is something of a pied piper to collectors who were children when he played and perhaps wrapped up in the Boys Own Annual glamour of the great all-rounder’s life.
It has only been in recent times there has been this kerfuffle about the baggy greenRichie BenaudStill, for your journeyman Test player, prices will often now hover around the $4,880 paid this year for World Series-era keeper John Maclean’s cap, sometimes even a little less if a buyer is lucky. There are some strange outliers in the mix too. Former off-spinner Greg Matthews certainly had a cult following in his playing days but the $45,000 paid for one of his caps in 1998 was well above market price. Research in Fahey and Coward’s book revealed that the cap was sold to Advanced Hair Studios boss Carl Howell at a Matthews testimonial auction arrange by the player’s then-agent Max Markson. Howell promptly gifted it back to his advertising star.
That Matthews incident actually highlights the often confusing and ever-evolving relationship of some players with their caps. Matthews incurred the wrath of some contemporaries when he “sold” his, but during his career he’d prized it like few players of his era, going as far as to wear it while he bowled as Grimmett once had.
In 2008 Matthews himself savaged an incident in which Australia’s Test squad wore blue baseball caps emblazoned with the Victoria Bitter logo during a tour match in Jamaica. That move was actually an attempt at solidarity with wicketkeeper Brad Haddin, at that point uncapped in Tests but Matthews still fumed, telling Fox Sports, “If someone told me I had to wear a VB hat, I’d tell them to piss off.” Not long after Cricket Australia introduced a secondary, non-official cap to avoid a repeat case.
Unders and overs
The recollection of cricket historian and cricket memorabilia collector David Frith, when asked as we researched the interactive graphic that accompanies this article, was that prior to the advent of the major London sales there weren’t a lot of baggy greens is circulation; they were either stashed away in garages and cupboards by players, swapped with opponents, put on display in museums or just as often given away as gifts.
Many bargains have emerged since the sale of the first Grimmett caps. $11,000 might have seemed a lot for a Benaud baggy green in 1999 but the same cap would command close to four times as much now and his 1957-58 South Africa series cap will soon test that theory in an auction in Melbourne. The path to the auction room of that cap sold in 1999 also gave hope to thrifty collectors; in the mid-80s the vendor had purchased it for 50 cents at a Dee Why op shop.
Other steals include the $3,750 paid for one-time Test skipper Brian Booth’s cap in a TV auction run by Sky Sports in 2001, $1,850 for a Neil Harvey in 1995, $2,750 for a Keith Stackpole issue as recently as 2011 and the $1,850 paid in 1998 for a Doug Walters that would now command at least 10 times that sum. Much of the local activity has occurred in the auction rooms of baggy green sales expert Charles Leski, now at Mossgreen in Armadale, an inner suburb of Melbourne. Leski has recorded sales for well over 80 baggy greens in the last 15 years, approximately two-thirds of all known sales.
There are plenty of oddities in the ranks, too, mainly due to the traditional practice of various Australian tour managers carrying around spares lest an uncapped player receive a late call-up. At least eight of those un-allocated caps have cropped up in sale rooms in the past three decades, selling for anywhere from $1,600 to a staggering $8,000. The latter price was realised at an auction in which Colin Miller’s special baggy green from the 2001 Centenary of Federation Test realised only $6,000, which can be viewed as either a momentary blip in the “Funky” market or a jarring reminder of fame’s fleeting embrace.
Stranger still are the touring caps that were issued to players who never quite made the grade, including Jack Potter (whose greater gift to Test cricket was teaching Shane Warne the flipper back when he was head coach of the AIS Cricket Academy), John Drennan and most curiously of all, cult Victorian pacemen Denis Hickey, who played for a Steve Waugh-led Australia B team to Zimbabwe in 1991, a trip on which all tour members were for some reason given official baggy greens.
Among ex-players, opinion is divided as to whether their fellow Test men should sell their caps. Mark Taylor is a traditionalist and told Fahey and Coward, “It disappoints me a little that it has become a commercial item rather than a personal one,” but then players of previous generations often have no say on the matter anyway, having given all of theirs away. Richie Benaud was never particularly fussed. “It is a piece of memorabilia and I’ve never been a memorabilia person,” he once said. “I say this not in a derogatory way but it has only been in recent times there has been this kerfuffle about the baggy green.”
Origin of the species
Though its design has survived largely unaltered for close to a century, the national cap bestowed upon Australia’s Test cricketers was not until relatively recently known by the internationally famous “baggy green” moniker, with most research indicating that the now ubiquitous term had certainly surfaced by the 1950s but has really only gathered momentum in the past 25 years.
Former Australian fast bowler Frank Misson told Fahey and Coward that in the early 1960s it was still known simply as “the cap” and that its “flouncy” aesthetic qualities were deemed a little outdated by his team-mates of that era.
Ian Chappell maintains that it was rarely spoken of by he or his 1970s team-mates and certainly never mentioned nor shown off by his grandfather, the former Australian captain Victor Richardson. In fact, Chappell possibly even fostered a team antipathy to what might have been construed as a symbol of an Australian cricket administration class then indifferent to the various plights of he and his players. “It’s a five-dollar piece of cloth,” Chappell once complained. “Now it’s given this huge fanfare. That’s bullshit. Bill Lawry used to use it to clean out the loft and it was covered in pigeon droppings.”
Chappell’s wariness of the cap’s rise to symbolic prominence is certainly worth considering because the Taylor and Waugh eras gave rise to many myths and “traditions” that simply didn’t occur in the past.
Even Bradman contemporary Bill Brown, who would later be held up by Waugh as “the embodiment of everything great about the baggy green cap” and the man asked to conduct some of the early presentations of caps to debutantes, admitted that he’d kept none of his own and in 2007 said, “In my day they were just cricket caps and flung into our bags. They were just part of the attire and not regarded much higher than your boots and treated much the same.” The last time Brown saw one of his own baggy greens it was being worn by a grandchild at a Sunday school picnic.
When Australian players first started wearing the cap it was not even baggy; between 1899 and 1920 the Test team wore the skull cap immortalised in George Beldam’s photograph of Victor Trumper stepping out to drive at The Oval. Trumper was the first in a long line of superstitious Australians and in that respect a kindred spirit with Waugh; that 1899 model rarely left his head in the decade following and a team-mate later recalled his old faithful being used by the great batsman as late as 1912.
Before Trumper arrived on the scene Australia’s cap wasn’t even green either; Dave Gregory’s 1878 tourists wore them brimless and azure blue; Billy Murdoch’s 1880 side wore magenta and black; at the Oval in 1882 Australia wore the 96th regiment’s red, black and yellow; the 1893 and 1896 tourists also wore blue and in the intervening home Tests the colours of whichever colonial association was hosting the match.
The change to green caps came in 1899, when the Melbourne Cricket Club secretary Ben Wardill bankrolled Australia’s first five-Test English tour and, eager not to be seen as sending a side that represented a private club and not the nation at large, approved green and gold attire for the side. The baggy cap came in time for the 1921 Ashes series, reflecting the fashion of the time and staying much the same shape thereafter, but subtle changes have accompanied it through the decades since. For instance the 1930 Ashes series model – the first and last manufactured by Scholium – featured a metal rivet on each side for ventilation.
To fully explain the coat of arms on Australia’s cap would require an essay itself. To this day the cap features the old Commonwealth coat of arms, now entirely unique to cricket because its Australian governing body of the time ignored its discontinuation in 1912. The “Advance Australia” below it was shortened to “Australia” in 1931-32, by which time kangaroos and emus had also been known to switch places on team attire.
Other myths aren’t hard to locate. “In my day the baggy green was much more publicised,” Neil Harvey once said in praise of Waugh’s efforts to burnish the cap’s reputation. “The papers in England would make a fuss of it and any new player wearing it. I just hope they never change the shape of it. Baggy is exactly how it should stay.” Which is all well and good, but barely a photograph or film clip from Harvey’s playing career features the left-hander with anything other than a brylcreamed mop of hair on top of his head.
He wasn’t alone; Keith Miller, Benaud and Alan Davidson rarely wore their caps either and Doug Walters was later moved to rue the “stupid trend” of his own era, in which he mostly wore a white, wide-brimmed “floppy” hat.
It goes without saying that Steve Waugh paid far more attention to the cap’s detail and it was in his reign that the Australians took to the field wearing replicas of the Trumper skull cap, Waugh going as far as to involve himself in the design process, consulting cricket historian Gideon Haigh for advice. Much of what we’ve come to know of the baggy green as a sacred and revered icon of Australian sport comes down to Waugh, his predecessor Mark Taylor and, to some extent, their successor Ricky Ponting, whose sense of traditionalism saw the banishment of Australia’s garish candy-stripe blazer in favour of the present model, a recreation of Bradman’s 1948 Invincibles version.
But it was actually under Taylor’s leadership that many of the baggy green cap rituals now taken as grand traditions took hold, even if Waugh’s voice was the loudest in the room when it was decided in a team meeting before the 1994-95 Ashes series kicked off that all 11 players should wear the baggy green onto the ground in the first fielding session of any Test henceforth, not as is commonly thought, to intimidate their opposition, but in Taylor’s words, “to show off the beauty of the cap and our pride in it”. Still, he admitted, “there is no doubt that its aura provides Australian teams with a psychological edge.”
Taylor once called himself a “cap tragic” and owns around 100 from his lifetime of cricket travels. Though there was never much fuss made of it, for some time he was the only man to have played 100 Tests under a single Australian cap. When another purporting to be his appeared at a memorabilia auction, it wasn’t hard for Taylor to issue the sellers with a correction.
Waugh, on the other hand, probably wore at least three caps in his career; an entirely new one was used during the 1993 Ashes after he’d misplaced his original during the previous Australian summer, though he’d later stop another he’d presented to a Waca Ground dressing room steward from going to auction. Waugh also collected caps from many Test opponents, though it would appear that the ones he used in swaps were the kinds of spare caps that team managers carried around.
Two years after inaugurating the wearing of caps in the first session, it was also Taylor who got the ball rolling on the cap presentations, inspiration for which came from the Australian Rules club jumper presentations of his youth. First up were Matthew Elliott and Michael Kasprowicz, ceremonially handed theirs by the skipper before the Brisbane Test in 1996. Three years later Waugh took up the baton with relish by instituting the practice of former Test men presenting newcomers with their caps. First up were Adam Gilchrist and Scott Muller, both handed their caps by Invincible Bill Brown.
This was all a far cry from when the likes of Taylor and Dean Jones unwrapped them from a jumble of sweaters and shirts in a metre-square cardboard box sent out by the ACB from their Jolimont Street offices. Likewise Shane Warne, who at least saved them postage by picking his precious cargo up in person.
It took a long time, but Australia’s women also now receive their dues with regards to caps and Southern Stars Test players are now presented them in much the same style as the men’s team. Elysse Perry, whose baggy green sits on a shelf in her bedroom when she’s not wearing it, recently told Guardian Australia that she vividly remembers the day hers was presented to her by former international Christina Matthews. Past players have also had retrospective caps awarded in recent times and that issued to Australia’s 1950s star Betty Wilson now sits in the “baggy green room” at the National Sports Gallery.
Nowadays players are issued with one cap only and Cricket Australia require them to fill out a statutory declaration if it is lost, stolen or too battered to go on, but until recently they seem to have been handed out indiscriminately. In he 1980s and 90s, official baggy greens were doled out to everyone from Australia B players, Prime Minister’s XI team members and even Australian Under-19s sides.
In those decades and prior, it was also common for players to receive multiple caps at once. Most often mentioned in this regard is the tale of Victorian Ken Eastwood being handed two to try on by ACB secretary Alan Barnes and never being asked to hand back the second, but his fellow one-Test wonders Ashley Woodcock and Peter Allen each went one better, receiving three caps despite making only a single appearance at Test level.
Ostentatious cap presentations were certainly not de rigeur under Barnes, whom fellow former administrator Bob Merriman would later recall literally tossing them around the dressing room to players on Australia’s 1979 tour of India as though he was delivering newspapers from a moving vehicle.
Accordingly, players didn’t always view them as indispensable keepsakes. Bradman, Arthur Morris, Ian Chappell and Bill Brown gave every single one of theirs away. To find out that one of his was on display at his former grade cricket club, Glenelg, Chappell had to be told by his old team-mate Ashley Mallett. “I don’t ever remember having one discussion about the cap during my playing days,” Chappell would later claim.
Such is the pomp and ceremony surrounding the presentation of the cap now that we’ve glossed over the less inspiring traditions and some weird and wonderful rituals that were left behind in the process.
Strangest of all was the widespread practice on 1970s tours of England for players to dash around town looking for a London Bobby willing to swap their iconic helmet for a baggy green cap. All of Doug Walters, Jeff Thomson, Max Walker, Mallett, David Hookes and Alan Turner would later admit to such a transaction and on the 1978 tour of the Caribbean, Thomson would negotiate an even more bizarre deal, swapping one of his caps for the field medals belonging to a Jamaican policeman who’d protected the team during the Sabina Park riot.
But the worst deal of all, surely, was struck by Rodney Hogg when he was lowballed into accepting a London Bobby’s lapel identification number, baton and handcuffs in return for a baggy green. “I should lock myself up, shouldn’t I?” he’d later admit. That officer, on the other hand, should probably start doing some rummaging.
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