Once upon a tour, 137 years ago

Later this summer, Australia will arrive to contest the Ashes for the 69th time. After landing in late June, they head down to Canterbury for the first of 16 fixtures over the course of a two-and-a-half month tour. Though the demands on the playing squad will be appreciable, they will be accompanied by an armada of support staff, and little expense will be spared by Cricket Australia as the visitors shuttle around the British Isles.

Still, modern cricket schedules are by common consensus increasingly demanding and the Australians, many of whom are currently in the West Indies for a two-Test series that immediately precedes the trip to England, will be entitled to feel pretty bushed by the time they depart in mid-September. As they board a plane that will deliver them home in about a day, several will slip on headphones or select an in-flight movie. One or two might even open a book. There are other kinds of journey, after all.

The Ashes, of course, originated in another world, that of late-Victorian England, where industry and commerce were just beginning to rub shoulders with organised sport. Throw burgeoning ideas of nationhood into the crucible and it is not hard to see how a contest between the cricket teams of England and Australia welded itself into the mighty structure it is today. But what was it like for those 19th-century pioneers, for whom a governing body meant something to do with the legislature and a nutrition expert was the person who knew where to find a good stout?

John Lazenby's The Strangers Who Came Home goes back to before the Sporting Times had considered the need to write its famous obituary for English cricket, in order to tell the story of the first Australian tour, in 1878. That the team played 37 matches in four months in Britain tells you something about the hectic nature of their trip; that they left Sydney as March turned to April, on a steamship bound for San Francisco, and returned, again via America, in late November, to be greeted by a cheering crowd of 20,000, adds to the sense of odyssey.

Moreover, the fact they were known as "the Eleven" was only a slight understatement of their strength. They set off with 11 playing members in the party and, although that number was supplemented along the way - by the "mutinous" Billy Midwinter and the manager, Jack Conway, among others - it was as an 11 that the Australians made their mark in England.

This was the tour on which the "fame of Australian cricket was established for all time". Following on from the combination matches in Melbourne that would later be designated the first Tests, Conway and England's James Lillywhite masterminded the return visit of Australia, giving the colonial cricketers a chance to prove themselves in the old country. For the "strangers", as they were referred to, it was also an opportunity to visit a place many still thought of as home, though only a few had ever set foot in England before.

They would not be strangers for long. The tour, reckoned the Sportsman, was "the biggest thing recorded in cricket" and the Eleven's disposal of MCC inside a day, in their second match, caused a sensation. Fred "The Demon" Spofforth had already made a name for himself in Australia with his habit of "splaying stumps, rattling ribcages and shredding the nerves of batsmen and fielders in equal measure" but his hat-trick at Lord's instantly elevated him to the status of Victorian celebrity. "A cannon shell, had it landed on the square, could not have rocked the foundations of the home of English cricket with any more force," Lazenby writes.

Soon enough, there was a "fever heat" of interest in the exploits of the Australians, as they travelled up and down the country by rail, to be greeted by thousands willing to pay their shilling. Initially the crowds had turned up as much out of curiosity, to see whether the visitors would be black-skinned, but it did not take long for word to spread of Spofforth and his bowling partner Harry "The Very Devil" Boyle, the dashing batsman Charles Bannerman, and the wicketkeeping "titan" Jack Blackham.

With their prominent whiskers and beards, these men stare gravely out from photographs. Lazenby brings them to life by sifting through a wealth of contemporary reportage, including the particularly valuable dispatches from the Victorian batsman Tom Horan, who wrote about the tour as "One of Them" (Horan would later become known as "Felix", Australia's foremost early cricket writer).

Lazenby also goes beyond the cricket to provide some historical ballast, describing the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad, on which the Eleven travelled across America, the threat of war with Russia hanging over England, and the beginnings of the London Underground - not to mention the "Great London Beer Flood" of 1814.

The Australians did not have much time to stop and contemplate all this as they hustled up and down the country, often arriving in outposts such as Swansea or Hull in the dead of night to snatch a few hours sleep before the start of an "against the odds" match, where as many as 18 or 22 players (often including several professional ringers) lined up against them. The tour was not short of controversies either, with no less a nemesis than WG Grace stalking the shadows.

Inevitably the Eleven occasionally appeared "fagged and jaded", though it seems as if the "endless round of banqueting and speeches" was regarded as more of an inconvenience than the constant cricket. It was, in the words of Spofforth, a "somewhat experimental tour", but one that had emphatically caught the imagination; four years later Spofforth and the Australians returned to light the fire under a sporting legend. In another summer of hype and hoopla, those proto-Ashes heroes - and their hardships - burn the brighter. And there should be no complaints about the schedule.

The Strangers Who Came Home
By John Lazenby
Bloomsbury
292 pages, £18.99