MCC's itinerary for Ashes exhibition in Australia

Date released: 8 March 2006

MCC is delighted to announce the itinerary for its Ashes exhibition in Australia in 2006-07.

With the urn as its centrepiece, it will tell the story of how this fragile object became the unlikely symbol of the hardest-fought battle in international cricket.

The Club’s exhibition will visit six museums in five cities - starting in Sydney, ending in Melbourne - over a fourteen-week period, to give countless Australian cricket fans the opportunity to see the urn for themselves.

It will be only the second time that the urn has ever been exhibited in Australia. The first was in 1988, as the country celebrated the bicentenary of European settlement.

An exhibition planned for 2002-03 had to be cancelled when X-rays revealed serious cracks in the urn's stem. The subsequent repair work, by conservation experts at Plowden & Smith, was successful, with the result that the urn - although still fragile - is now in a suitable condition to be flown between England and Australia.

The flights to and from Australia, and between the five Australian cities, will be the responsibility of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Blue, respectively, following the agreement (announced in September) of a special partnership between MCC and the Virgin Group.

Speaking about the tour, Adam Chadwick, MCC's Curator said: “In 2005 alone, more than 35,000 people - from all over the world - came to the MCC Museum at Lord's, where they could see the Ashes urn for themselves. This touring exhibition will enable many more Australian cricket lovers, right across the country, to see the urn and learn more about its long and fascinating history."

He continued: "We are particularly pleased to be staging this tour, after our previous plans had to be cancelled. MCC looks forward to working closely with the six museums chosen to stage a great exhibition which will, we hope, be seen and enjoyed by tens of thousands of people."

As well as the urn itself, the exhibition will feature other Ashes-related artefacts. They will include the velvet bag presented to Hon Ivo Bligh, the then England captain, in which he kept the urn after it had been presented to him; the minute book which recorded the decision of his widow - one of the ladies who had made this presentation - to bequeath the urn to MCC in 1927; the original scorebook from the 1882 match at The Oval together with portraits of 'The Demon’ Spofforth and Dr WG Grace.

Also on display will be a facsimile (presented to MCC by the British Library in 2005) of the ‘Sporting Times’ article which first gave rise to the expression "the Ashes"; and the official Ashes trophy, commissioned by MCC from Waterford Crystal, which was first presented to Australia's captain, Mark Taylor, at the end of the 1998-99 series. More recently, Tom Graveney (then MCC's President) presented it to Michael Vaughan last September, after England's success in 2005.

In addition to hosting the exhibition, each of the six museums will be organising special Ashes-themed events - including talks by Adam Chadwick and MCC's Archivist & Historian, Glenys Williams.

The full itinerary for MCC’s exhibition is:

Links to each museum's website can be found by clicking here