When Australia first beat England in England in 1882, Reginald Shirley Brooks, writing in The Sporting Times wrote a famous mock obituary in which he stated that English cricket had “died at The Oval on 29th August 1882” and that the “body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”. A year later, England’s captain Ivo Bligh remarked that England would travel to Australia to “recover those ashes” and while the phrase disappeared from use for the next two decades, thereafter it became the adopted name of the series from around 1903, being first mentioned in Wisden in 1905.