Young’s forgotten Test cricketer Alfred “Hoppy” Hopkins in two individual postcard portraits and with the 1902 Australian cricket team. Photos: Wikimedia Commons.
Young has given Australian cricket two Test-level players.
Most people know Nathan Lyon, whose off-spin has become one of the most potent weapons in Australian cricket. Almost nobody remembers the swing bowler who came first.
His name was Albert John Young Hopkins – though nobody ever called him that. To some he was Bert, to others Hoppo and others Hoppy. He probably answered to all three.
He was born in Young on 3 May 1874, in a town still catching its breath. Barely a decade earlier, the gold rush had turned the place – then called Lambing Flat – from a sheep paddock into a roaring city of tents.
By the time Hoppy arrived, the gold had gone and Young was settling into something quieter, more agricultural.
He didn’t stay long. His family moved to Sydney while he was still a small boy, and while Young always played a part in his name, it was Sydney that made him.
He grew to be six feet, broad-shouldered – the kind of man who fills a field and, apparently, he filled it well.
By all accounts he was a genuine all-rounder: at his best a most attractive and courageous batsman who often opened the innings, a medium-paced swing bowler with a command of flight and real cunning, and a fielder whose outfielding every obituary independently described as magnificent.
He was also something of a pioneer.
One obituary noted he was one of the earliest Sydney bowlers to master swing – the art of making the ball curve deceptively through the air then move off the pitch in the opposite direction, a skill that is now central to fast bowling but was barely understood at the time.
In the early 1900s this was considered genuinely novel, and in English conditions, where the damp air assisted movement, it proved lethal.
Hoppy toured England in 1902, 1905 and 1909. Across all three tours – Tests, county games, university fixtures – he took 104 wickets at an average of 23 and made 2490 runs at an average of 24. His 1902 tour was his finest: 1192 runs at nearly 26 and 38 wickets at 17.60.
Yet in the Tests themselves he managed just 21 wickets in 17 matches.
Cricket historian Abhishek Mukherjee, writing in Cricket Country, called him “the man who was never used” – and the numbers bear it out.
Surrounded by formidable teammates with far more Ashes experience – Hugh Trumble on his fifth tour of England, Ernest Jones his third – and captains invariably reached for the familiar names before Hoppy.
In five of those 17 Tests he was not asked to bowl a single ball. He turned up, fielded magnificently, batted when required and waited.
There was one afternoon at Lord’s in June 1902 when everything came together.
Rain had been falling, the crowd was restless, and his captain Joe Darling surprised everyone by throwing Hoppy the ball to open the bowling.
Charles Burgess Fry drove at the first ball and sent it straight to Clem Hill at short-leg. Next ball, Kumar Shri (Ranji) Ranjitsinhji – one of the most elegant batsmen the game has ever seen – was bowled off his pad. Two of the most celebrated batsmen in the world were gone without a run between them.
The rain returned, the match was abandoned and Hoppy never took another wicket in that series. But for one brief, grey London morning, he had been untouchable.
His finest innings came in Adelaide in December 1908 after the opposition had a chance to dismiss him early and didn’t take it.
Hoppy made them pay. He stayed at the crease for most of the day, putting on 131 with Warren Bardsley before Bardsley was dismissed, then adding another 283 alongside Monty Noble before leaving the field with 218 to his name.
That partnership with Noble stood as a Sheffield Shield record for nearly 20 years, until the great Victorian batsman, Bill Ponsford, and Hunter Hendry finally broke it against Queensland.
What kind of man was he off the field? Here the sources, for once, are generous.
One obituarist reached for Shakespeare to describe him – “a fellow of infinite jest” – who had a “fund of humour” and was one of the best raconteurs, helping to drive dull care away with his stories of cricket and cricketers.
Hoppy spent his working life as a civil servant, processing the wills and estates of the dead in the NSW Probate Office for more than 25 years. He was also a beekeeper.
But he kept playing club cricket for North Sydney well into his 40s – respected for his bowling and his counsel – and was a familiar face at the Sydney Cricket Ground not just for Test matches but for ordinary grade games, sitting among a sprinkling of spectators who probably had no idea the quietly laughing man in the crowd had once made Ranjitsinhji look foolish at Lord’s.
He died on 25 April 1931 – eight days short of his 57th birthday – and was buried that day at St Thomas’ Church of England Cemetery in the Northern Suburbs. He left behind a widow and no children.
But the cricket gene didn’t die with him. His younger brother Cyril had followed him into first-class cricket, moving to New Zealand and becoming, in 1912, the first Otago batsman ever to score a century against Canterbury.
A nephew, Herbert, earned an Oxford Blue, played county cricket for Worcestershire and became a professor of pathology in Singapore – surviving wounds on the Western Front in the first war and Japanese internment in the second. Herbert died in Somerset in 1972, leaving two children.
Young carries Hoppy’s memory lightly, if at all. Nathan Lyon is the town’s cricketing hero now — a household name, a face on billboards, a man with 567 Test wickets and a nickname, the GOAT.
They could hardly be more different – Lyon is a spin bowler who has taken more than 567 Test wickets, Hoppy a swing bowler who managed 21. Not for want of ability, but for want of a captain willing to throw him the ball.
Both came from Young. Both though, in their very different ways, left batsmen guessing.
Sources include digitised newspaper archives held at Trove (trove.nla.gov.au), including the original death notice and obituaries published in Sydney newspapers in April 1931, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, and Cricket Country (cricketcountry.com).
Original Article published by Edwina Mason on About Regional.
