Ben Butterworth
English cricketer in Australia (1832-1879)
Benjamin Butterworth (2 May 1833 – 6 January 1879) was an English-born Australian cricketer. He played three first-class cricket matches for Victoria between 1857 and 1862.
Life and career
Ben Butterworth was born in Rochdale, Lancashire, and went to Australia in the 1850s. He established a business as a merchant in Castlemaine, Victoria, and married Eliza Hepburn, daughter of the prominent local pastoralist John Stuart Hepburn, at Hepburn's property at Smeaton on 9 March 1859.
In cricket, Butterworth was renowned for his fielding prowess in the position of long stop, which was an important position at the time, before the development of wicket-keeping techniques in the 1880s made it obsolete at the highest levels of the game. He was considered one of the best long stops in Australia, and "as good a long stop as anyone in England". He was chosen to play for Victoria for his long-stopping alone. Before Victoria's match against the touring English team in January 1862, The Age said: "Benjamin Butterworth, as long stop, is unrivalled in the Australian colonies. Takes the ball cleanly, throws in sharply and with certainty, and covers a great extent of ground." Of his batting it said only: "A wild bat, and cannot be depended upon for runs." In six first-class innings he made only four runs.
He captained a Castlemaine XXII to victory over the English team in March 1862.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ben Butterworth” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.