Description: Showing Alfred Shaw (with the axe in his hand in the centre) in the timber yard of the cricket bat works that he ran with his fellow cricketer and friend Arthur Shrewsbury. They manufactured cricket bats by hand from English Willow. This photograph shows the cut logs of willow at the point where they were cut and stacked in bat sized pieces, ready for planing. Alfred Shaw was born at Burton Joyce on August 29th 1842, and he learned the art of cricketing 'on the road at Burton Joyce.' It was believed that he could drop the ball on a shilling and he said: 'If I could help it, I never bowled two balls alike...In my earlier days I used to lie in bed studying how to get batsmen out, and that was I came to be able to break both ways, to cultivate the dropping ball and so on. In my opinion length and variation of pace constitute the secret of successful bowling.' Alfred usually performed his great feats with fast bowler Fred Morley at the other end. Morley related: 'Alfred always looks at the wicket and says to me: 'I'm going to bowl from this end, Fred; you can bowl which end you like.' And Richard Daft once said: 'In Nottinghamshire we used to have Shaw and Morley. When we needed a change we could have Morley and Shaw.' Shaw was a bad batsman and Morley even worse. It was said that when Morley came out to bat the Trent Bridge horse would automatically take its place between the shafts of the roller. Shaw captained Nottinghamshire to four successive Championship titles from 1883-86. In a career spanning 34 seasons he bowled more overs than he conceded runs and never bowled a wide or a no-ball. He clean bowled W.G.Grace 20 times and bowled the first ball of the first-ever Test Match in 1877 at Melbourne, Australia. Touring Australia five times as a player, he also managed the tourists in 1891-92 and took the first Rugby Union tourists to Australia in 1888. In 1878 he took 196 wickets at an average of 10.63 and in a match against Gloucestershire in 1884 he performed a double hat-trick plus 3 wickets in 4 balls. He became the first bowler to dismiss 2,000 batsmen in first-class matches and when he died in 1907 his last request was to be buried close to his old Notts. colleague, Arthur Shrewsbury, in Gedling churchyard. (this information was extracted from the very interesting web site 'Bygone Cricket Nottinghamshire' at http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/sherwoodtimes/cricket.htm)