| On 2 September 1882, a couple of days after the Oval defeat, Brooks’s 39-word obituary appeared on the front of The Sporting Times. Brooks was certainly poking fun at the situation but he was also using it to further a cause close to his heart. The clue is in that last line – the NB that became eponymous for cricket. “The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”. Brooks was not so subtly promoting a hot and rather macabre topic of the time: the campaign for cremation. Brooks’s father had also been a journalist and served as editor of the satirical Punch magazine. In the 1870s Shirley Brooks was an early and ardent campaigner for cremation, still illegal in Britain at the time. Brooks senior had read and been inspired by a paper entitled The Treatment of the Body After Death, written by the pre-eminent surgeon and polymath Sir Henry Thompson. Together with a small number of signatories that included the novelist Anthony Trollope and artist John Everett Millais they produced a declaration in 1874 that they “disapprove of the present custom of burying the dead” and desired to “adopt the method usually known as cremation”, a process that they noted “rapidly resolved the body into its component elements”. The Cremation Society of England was thereby founded. Too late, it turned out, for Brooks Sr who died only a few weeks later, on 23 February 1874, and was buried in the “fashionable” cemetery at Kensal Green. The Guardian noted at the time that several of Brooks’s “literary friends”, including Charles Dickens, were in attendance. The campaign for cremation rumbled on over the next few years. In 1879 the body of a horse was cremated “completely and rapidly” at a new furnace in Woking. Benjamin Disraeli’s government clamped down on these “experiments”, forcing The Cremation Society’s hand to instead concentrate on winning over the public. In 1882, shortly after the Australian cricket team docked on English shores, the issue was in the news once more when a Captain Hanham in Dorset contacted the society in order to help him fulfil the express wishes of his deceased wife and mother by cremating them in a facility he had built himself. When Reginald Shirley Brooks wrote his satirical obituary in September the case was getting plenty of publicity. It’s fair to suggest that Brooks Jr seized the opportunity to have a wry dig at the state of English cricket while also furthering a cause close to his late father’s heart. Captain Hanham cremated his wife and mother a month later, in Ocotber 1882, and went unprosecuted. A precedent was set and the following year cremation was made legal, “provided no nuisance is caused in the process to others”. The first legal cremation occurred in 1885 and in shades of Steve Coogan’s monotone pool attendant in the The Day Today – The Cremation Society’s website notes that in “1886, 10 bodies were cremated”. The practice became more commonplace and widely accepted over the following years. Something of a Victorian cad, Reginald Brooks was a heavy gambler, drinker and known in social circles for his philandering. He died in 1888 aged only 34 and is interred next to his father and sister Emily at Kensal Green. You won’t find mention of either Shirley or Reginald Brooks in the official pamphlet at Kensal Green. I know because I visited this week. The guided tour of the 72-acre site (every first and third Sunday of the month) stops by the final resting places of Charles Babbage, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Harold Pinter but not the flat stone slab in plot 31 just off the south avenue. Covered as it was in soil and scrub, it looked like no one had stopped by in a while. The Brookses never wanted to be there in the first place. The Cremation Society had to rail against “conservatism and custom” in order to make a difference. When the crowds file down Harleyford Road from Vauxhall station for the final Ashes Test on Thursday they’ll pass Brook’s pithy 39-word obituary on the way to see Ben Stokes’s England Test side. Quite fitting really. Quote of the week “Boss, we’re too lucky to get wet” Stuart Broad recalls Brendon McCullum’s words to him with rain forecast at Old Trafford. Sadly, not even the power vested in Bazball could bend the clouds away from Manchester. Is it Cowardly to Pray for Rain? The rain in Manchester at the weekend took its toll on the Test and Ashes series. The unrelenting drip, drip, drip also clearly affected some more than others. A few emailers to the Guardian’s over-by-over coverage suggested that it was plainly not right for Pat Cummins’s side to retain the urn in such damp-squib circumstances. The more avant garde thinkers even stated that Cummins should declare Australia’s second innings and consequently gift the match to England. C’mon, Pat, do the honourable thing! Fans on both sides engaged in some tomfoolery and plenty of weather app-based bants – Barbie v Oppenheimer was usurped by Met Office v Accu Weather in cricketing circles. Tapping into the discourse during one prolonged delay, Mike Atherton on Sky’s coverage mentioned the Guardian’s book Is it Cowardly to Pray for Rain?, the collection of our OBO coverage of the 2005 Ashes series. Eighteen years on it is a fantastic artefact of an incredible summer – “The online Ashes chronicle of a nation’s office-bound nervousness”, as the blurb goes. “Essentially the over-by-over should not work,” states the foreword. Yet it did and still does. I remember reading the OBO in sixth form as England won the Ashes for the first time in 16 long years. It’s accompanied me through my own office drudgery, far-flung travels, ill-timed weddings and wifi-weary train journeys ever since. I wrote a few years ago about how it was one of the things that got me through a rough patch. The witty and erudite commentary drawing readers in and creating its own cricketing lexicon and community. “Four Test and more snakish twists and turns than Peter Mandelson on the Pepsi Max Big One” wrote Sean Ingle in his preamble for the fifth Test. “I have absolutely no worries about England here, mate,” crowed Rob Smyth on the final morning at Edgbaston”, adding “I can’t take this any more” shortly afterwards. There are fewer hangovers (blatant ones at least) around nowadays but the OBO continues to go from STS (strength-to-strength) even if some of the emails are clearly crackers or are just asking if it’s possible to post the BBC’s TMS overseas link for the billionth time. | 