William Shuttleworth: A Man for His Seasons

William Shuttleworth and Harry Sweetman of the Maple Leaf Baseball Club of Hamilton, 1860. (Toronto Globe, August 15, 1903)

 

After quietly resting in the backroom of Canadian sports history for over a century, William Shuttleworth is now fully recognized for his role in establishing the country’s first formal team, the Young Canadians (later Maple Leafs), in 1854. He had a distinguished playing career and organizational role beyond Hamilton, and contributed to the game’s growth from umpiring to its promotion. He was inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame in 2015, and the next year into Canada’s Baseball Hall of Fame and his local Hamilton sports hall.

William Shuttleworth was born in Brantford, Ontario (when the province was known as Upper Canada), in 1834. He lived most of his teenage and adult years in Hamilton, Ontario (when the province was known as Canada West before becoming Ontario following the country’s July 1, 1867, Confederation), and spent his final years with a son in Geneva, New York, where he died in 1903. He was buried with his wife, Matilda, in a Hamilton cemetery, and then was almost forgotten. Shuttle-worth, however, was more than an accomplished ballplayer in the game’s primeval past. He was president of the Maple Leafs (after they changed their name from the Young Canadians) for over a decade. He assumed vice president and president roles with the fledgling and original Canadian Base Ball Association in 1864 (when the game was still spelled with two words), as well as umpiring one of the most significant games of his era. He represents the overlooked independent identity of those playing baseball in Ontario in its formative years, almost exclusively Canadian- or British-born, and with negligible American input and content.

Baseball’s formative stages had deep roots in the Hamilton area. The Hamilton Times newspaper in 1874 had described an old-timer’s memory of locals playing the old-style game on the June 4 Militia Muster Day in 1819 in Hamilton.1 The old-style game was best characterized by the use of a softer ball thrown at a runner between bases. If the ball connected, the runner was out. It was a practice called soaking or plugging. Alongside the contentious (well, only to some American baseball historians) June 4 game in Beachville almost 20 years later, these games are among the earliest examples we have of human agency driving the regular playing of baseball at an appointed time. No longer would they be part of an obligation to an old-world folk custom with diminishing but still significant roots in what had once been an exclusively religious-ordained or primitive cultural celebration. The Canadian June 4 games were an essential proto-modern innovation predating even American steps to leave behind a game embedded in this folk culture.

Given these circumstances, we can be fairly confident William Shuttleworth played some version of baseball as a child growing up in nearby Brantford. Brantford is only 25 miles west of Hamilton, admittedly a considerable distance in pre-railway Ontario, but a necessary journey for settlers, traveling salespeople, and emerging civic leaders.

There are, as yet, no reports contemporary to the time of the Hamilton Young Canadians’ formation in 1854,2 but near-in-time records exist to confirm the year and Shuttleworth’s role. Thomas Hutchinson’s 1862-63 Directory for Hamilton3 stated that the Maple Leaf Base Ball Club (formerly Young Canadian) was organized in April 1854, and that its current officers (for 1862) included Wm. Shuttleworth, President; Chas. Waugh, Vice President; David Davies, Secretary; Thomas Carroll, Treasurer. They played on the grounds facing Central School, between Bond and Bowery Streets. The Burlington Base Ball Club was organized a year later. Its 1862 officers were J.C. Davis, President; P.W. Dayfoot, Vice President; J.J. Mason, Secretary; and George Black, Treasurer. They played on the grounds on Upper James Street at the corner of Robinson.

The second reference to the organization of Hamilton baseball was found in the Hamilton Spectator’s report of December 4, 1865, regarding the Maple Leaf Base Ball Club Dinner. It said:

“Last evening the members of the Maple Leaf Base Ball club held their first Annual Dinner in their room on John Street, the President Mr. W. Shuttleworth, occupying the Chair and Mr. Thos. Carroll the Vice-Chair. About 30 persons sat down to the spread, which was provided by T. Young, saloonkeeper and was got up in the best style. The usual toasts of the Queen, the Royal Family, the Governor General, the press, etc. were drunk with all the honors, and songs appropriate to these were sung by several members of the Club. The toast “Prosperity to the Maple Leaf Base Ball Club” having been proposed, the President replied in suitable terms, giving a short sketch of the Club, its organization in 1854, since which time it has been steadily increasing up to the present time. Toasts and speech making was kept up till a late hour, all apparently enjoying themselves.”

A report on the same gathering in the Hamilton Times of December 2, 1865, said the team was “virtually the parent of all other organizations of the kind in Western Canada as it most assuredly is the first in the science of the game.” It was then announced that the club was moving from its “old grounds upon Main Street” to new playing grounds on [Upper] James Street. In conclusion, the revelers in attendance declared, “For their efficiency in the game, and the general prosperity of the Maple Leaf, much is due to the President, Mr. William Shuttleworth. He has always manifested a deep interest in the same, and his encouragement of such manly recreations reflects creditably upon the character of the gentleman.” They concluded with a rendition honoring a “jolly good fellow.”

Finally, the Hamilton Times report of the Maple Leaf Base Ball Club’s annual supper in its February 23, 1867, edition said that Mr. Wm. Shuttleworth, the President, was proud to boast that the Maple Leaf was the father of all Canadian Ball Clubs, that he himself was the paternal head of the Maple Leaf, and finally that it had organized 14 years earlier under the name of the Young Canadian Club.4 The name change to Maple Leaf had occurred in the early 1860s.

The first, contemporary to its time, news coverage of baseball in Hamilton did not occur until 1858, when the team’s executive, but one not including William Shuttleworth, was listed. His exclusion can be ascribed to his desire to play the game rather than manage its off-field needs. A very primitive box score in the same year speaks only of teams from Hamilton’s East and West ends playing what might be a five-inning game, or maybe a game featuring five-a-side.5 We do not know, and will likely never know. One thing we can be certain of is that they were playing the Canadian old-style plugging game, since this is what William’s younger brother James, a shoemaker, introduced into Woodstock6 when he moved there after a downturn in Hamilton’s economy in the late 1850s.7 Notably, an 1860 description of this old-style game in the Ingersoll Chronicle8 also mentions its five-inning character, contrasting it with a two-inning version as played in London in 1856,9 suggesting that even in Ontario variations of the game were played.

In 1859, two teams of tobacconists10 from Hamilton and Toronto played the first game in this part of the world featuring the New York rules, and a year later Shuttleworth and Hamilton’s two teams, the Young Canadians and the Burlingtons, met teams from Buffalo in the first international games played under those rules. Shuttleworth’s team was preceded to the honor of being first by a few weeks, but the fate of both Canadian teams was the same.11 They lost, perhaps a consequence of their recent adoption of the New York rules game with its harder ball, and the Canadians’ unfamiliarity with this game’s speed and physical challenges.

A critic of this independent Canadian role in the game’s proto-modern and eventual modernization might cite this adoption of the New York rules game as proof of the Canadian subservience to American leadership, but in fact it proves the opposite. Baseball’s folk and proto-modern popularity dated to times long before the New York rules came into vogue in a variety of regional variations throughout North America, including southern Ontario. The adoption by these places of the New York rules game ensured that it would flourish elsewhere rather than remain a locally distinct recreation for its geographically close enthusiasts such as, but not limited locally to, the Knickerbocker Club. These regional variations, though generally favoring the “soaking” version of the game, opted for the New York rules game because it was considered a better game. The ball could be hit farther, the game required a higher level of skill, it was more dangerous and therefore more entertaining, and, perhaps most significantly, its adoption allowed baseball to rival cricket as a more scientific and adult game.

At all stages throughout the 1860s, with the exception of a brief period in 1861 when the Young Canadians changed their name to the Maple Leafs, William Shuttleworth was president of the team.12 No reason was given for the name change, though perhaps it was to avoid confusion with his brother James’s namesake Young Canadians in Woodstock. It may also have provided an excuse for some of the players from the rival Burlingtons to join a more neutrally named team. In return, the Maple Leafs, as noted above, eventually adopted the Burlington grounds on Upper James Street near the “Mountain,” forsaking the Young Canadians’ first home near the city’s Central School. Whatever laurels the Hamilton Maple Leafs had earned as Ontario’s leading team, however, were not long lasting, as by the end of 1861 Woodstock reigned supreme, having defeated the Maple Leafs by two runs in their first encounter.13 Never again would the Hamilton team come this close to defeating their southwestern Ontario rival.

One particularly notable aspect of its evolution further confirms the identity of baseball in Canada as a game developed alongside, rather than in subservience to, Americans during these formative years of transition from a proto-modern form to a fully modern game in the 20-year period from 1854 through 1873. That is a virtual absence of American participation and influence. William Shuttleworth is simply the best example of how this first generation of recognized Canadian baseball players were exclusively either Canadian- or British-born. While a few ballplayers had unclear birthplaces in either the British province of Canada, the United States, or Britain, with but one exception they were almost certainly raised from childhood in the British province of Canada before it became a formal nation in 1867.14

In the interest of full disclosure, the significant exception was an American immigrant and ballplayer, Charles L. Wood. Wood’s role was important, persuading Woodstock to switch to the New York rules in 1861. By that time, however, Hamilton and Toronto had already adopted them. Wood was not even an apostle from New York City, but came from central New York state, where he might have been initially exposed to the New York rules at the same time as Toronto and Hamilton players were experimenting with them. He came to Woodstock not as a baseball advocate but as an entrepreneur interested in running a hotel. He married into the ballplaying and tragic Douglas family15 of Woodstock before spending his last years peripatetically moving west with his wife to the American Pacific coast. His advocacy for the New York rules game was as much about being able to play other Canadian towns, there being only limited competition with teams from south of the border until the 1870s. As well, Wood, along with Shuttleworth, would make up the first executive of the Canadian Base Ball Association in 1864;16 Wood’s presidency lasted only a few months when for unknown reasons he vacated the post in favor of Shuttleworth.

In 1862 William Shuttleworth married Matilda White of Hamilton, whom he likely met at a church bazaar. They raised five children, as William first depended on a clerking job with a dry-goods firm. Later he briefly ran his own retail operation, in which he promoted and sold tickets for games with visiting teams, most notably Bob Addy’s famous Rockford (Illinois) squad in 1870. Eventually, however, he returned to employment under others. He thus lacked the personal wealth and the social position enjoyed by at least some of his teammates. Although an injury could have seriously jeopardized his ability to care for his young family, he nevertheless played the dangerous position of catcher throughout much of the 1860s. His limited protection was a piece of leather clenched between his teeth, and perhaps a small hand protector more like a thin glove than the trapper’s mitts of today. Despite a continuing absence of financial security, he traveled to nearby Canadian towns and cities to play and later umpire the game. He went to Detroit with the Maple Leaf team in 1867 for what was ambitiously called a World Base Ball Tournament. In the premier level of the competition the team captured a gold ball in recognition of its third-place finish.17 The prize remained in the family until at least the 1940s, in the possession of Shuttleworth’s youngest son Harry. Its fate thereafter is unknown.

Shuttleworth’s bravery and sense of civic duty were never better demonstrated than when he volunteered for the 13th Battalion in Hamilton in 1866, when Fenian raids from south of the border, aimed at freeing Ireland from Britain’s control, threatened to bring the British province into conflict with a potentially larger American invasion force, fresh from its Civil War experience. One account says that a Private Shuttle-worth was nearly killed by a bullet deflecting off his rifle.18 We cannot be certain it was William, but his early volunteering and later status as the 13th Battalion’s color sergeant argue forcibly for it being him.

In 1868 Shuttleworth umpired the raucous Canadian championship game between Guelph and Woodstock in the latter town before thousands of spectators, many of whom had come from Guelph by the early afternoon train. The game degenerated into chaos and brawling in the stands. Both sides applauded Shuttleworth’s neutral oversight as Woodstock retained its Canadian championship and the silver ball trophy.19

A year later brother James died suddenly at the age of 29. He had rejoined William’s Hamilton team in 1862. The papers sadly described the funeral procession for James, led by his Maple Leafs teammates, but gave no mention of what had brought about his premature end. A possible cause, however, might be found in a brief comment in a Bowmanville newspaper several days later.20 Bowmanville is about as far east of Toronto as Hamilton is west, and the towns often met in friendly baseball competition. Without naming anyone, the newspaper article described a Dundas-based shoemaker who had killed himself, unhappy with his home life, and whose business was doing poorly. The profession fits that of James Shuttleworth, and Dundas is a nearby urban adjunct to Hamilton. Imagining that another Hamilton-area shoemaker died under similar circumstances in the same week as James’s untimely and unexplained end seems improbable. A verdict of suicide would be a strong reason for such a paucity of details in local papers, and why silence followed.

William, nearing 40, had disappeared from the team’s executive by 1872, ironically, or perhaps not so, the same year Guelph began the process of bringing imported professionals into the country, in this case the former Boston Red Stockings player Sam Jackson. A few years later, however, William played in what is almost certainly the first-ever “Old Timer’s Game” in Canada, an event that was caricatured in the Canadian Illustrated News.21 He then departed the active baseball scene, perhaps because he was needed at home. In 1884 Matilda died, having been ill for some time from what was described as a brain disease. The widower William now relied increasingly on his grown-up children. His oldest son looked after the family’s younger siblings. William moved to Geneva, New York, with a son James in the 1890s, undertaking an artisan role as an upholsterer before dying there in 1903.

It is possible we would still have little or no awareness of William Shuttleworth but for Dr. Bryan D. Palmer’s book A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario.22 The book is a serious piece of academic research and analysis having little to do with baseball except for the story of the skilled workers who played the game in this nineteenth-century Canadian city. The Shuttle-worth brothers were central to his account. For baseball’s historians, it was an important example of why one’s research should never be restricted to obvious sports-related materials.

WILLIAM HUMBER’s five books on baseball include Diamonds of the North: A Concise History of Baseball in Canada (1995). He has been a facilitator since 1979 of an in-class and now online subject Baseball Spring Training for Fans, is an inductee into Canada’s Baseball Hall of Fame (2018), and was appointed to the Order of Canada (2022) for his baseball research. He finds it all a tad overwhelming.

 

Notes

1 At first appearing in the Hamilton Times, but not available today. A short essay, “Training Day 1819: George Ill’s Birthday and Its Celebration,” was first discovered in an 1895 brochure entitled, Souvenir book and programme for military encampment given by the Ladies’ Committee of the Wentworth Historical Society, edited and compiled by M.J. Nisbet, assisted by F.L. Davis (Hamilton: Griffin & Kidner, 1895), 44-45. Being so long after the events of 1819, there was concern for its reliability. Its later discovery in the Woodstock Sentinel (July 10, 1874), after being reprinted that year (1874) from the Hamilton Times, has put those concerns to rest, particularly because it appeared 12 years before Adam Ford’s 1886 Beachville remembrance of baseball play, also on a June 4 occasion.

2 The pages of the Hamilton Gazette reviewed from 1854 and 1855 make no mention of baseball, but given that the game was new and the club as formed was likely only for intrasquad purposes, the lack of reporting either directly or incidentally is not surprising.

3 Thomas Hutchinson’s 1862-63 Directory (Hamilton, C.W. [Ont.]: John Eastwood & Co., 1862), 224.

4 While 14 years does not line up neatly with 1854, the team may have been formed during the winter of 1853-54, and he simply subtracted 1853 from 1867. Or he could have included the year 1867 in his calculation, or simply been mistaken by a year. The year of 1854 is most plausible, however, given the other evidence.

5 Hamilton Spectator, August 14, 1858, with the barest of details, citing only East and West end clubs and what appears to have been a five-inning match, though it might also have been a five-a-side match lasting only one inning.

6 The source for this is a 1915 reminiscence by J. Henry Brown in the Woodstock Sentinel Review of April 12, 1915. “James Shuttleworth of Maple Leaf of Hamilton club came to work in Woodstock as a shoe maker [presumably in 1860 since he was in the games played that year against Ingersoll] and helped organize the team on a lot on Reeve St. back of the Post Office. Later a man named Wood [Charles L.] came to Woodstock and the old style game was given up and the regular American game adopted.” The small problem with this chronology is that the Maple Leaf moniker would not be associated with Hamilton’s team until 1861, but this may be due to a later confusion as to the timing of the club’s naming. James’s residence however is not in doubt. He appears in the 1861 census in Woodstock, though the name is misspelled as Suttleworth. One more frustration for later researchers!

7 “Then came the crisis of 1859, and with it financial disaster to Hamilton.” In Herbert Lister, Hamilton History, Commerce, Industries, Resources issued under the auspices of the City Council (Hamilton: Spectator Printing Company, 1913), 25.

8 The Chronicle (Ingersoll), July 27, 1860: “Each side had five innings, the Young Canadians [Woodstock] taking the first. The total amount scored by the Young Canadians was 83; and the total score of the Rough and Readys [Ingersoll] 59 – the Young Canadians winning by 24.”

9 New York Clipper, September 27, 1856 featured the box score for a game between the London base ball club and one from a nearby “suburban” adjunct, Delaware.

10 W.C.F. Caverhill, Caverhill’s Toronto City Directory for 1859-60 (Toronto: W.C.F. Caverhill, 1859); Thomas Hutchinson’s 1862-63 Directory (Hamilton, C.W. [Ont.]: John Eastwood & Co., 1862).

11 On August 18, 1860 the Burlingtons of Hamilton lost to the Queen Citys of Buffalo 30-25 in what historian Joseph Overfield (Niagara Frontier magazine, Summer 1964: 59-60) described as the first ever international baseball match. It was played in Clifton, what is now Niagara Falls, Canada. In late August 1860, the Young Canadian Club of Hamilton were humbled in their first cross-border match with the Niagara Club of Buffalo, 87-13, and though the account is somewhat unclear, it appears the Hamilton team may have played with the additional men common to the “Canadian” game, while Niagara played by the New York rules. At a return match in Buffalo, the Young Canadians lost by a more respectable 45-13 score (Overfield).

12 New York Clipper, April 14, 1860. For the first time on the public record, William Shuttleworth is listed as president of the then Young Canadian Base Ball Club of Hamilton, C.W. (C.W. is Canada West, Ontario’s name before the July 1, 1867, Confederation.) As late as 1870 (New York Clipper, May 7, 1870) it was reported that W. Shuttleworth had been reelected president of the (long since renamed) Hamilton Maple Leafs.

13 The Shuttleworth brothers confronted each other on the diamond on Tuesday, September 3, 1861, in Hamilton as the Young Canadians of Woodstock scored three in the top of the ninth to outlast the Maple Leaf of Hamilton, 24-22. As reported in the New York Clipper, September 21, 1861.

14 I reviewed, through Ancestry.com, players making up the lineups and administration of leading Canadian (really Ontario-based) teams in the 1854 through 1873 period. They included London Club and Delaware Club (1856), Hamilton Young Canadians (later Maple Leafs), Hamilton Burlingtons, Woodstock Young Canadians (old-style and New York game rules), Ingersoll Rough and Ready, Ingersoll Victorias, Dundas Independents, Guelph Maple Leafs, London Athletics and Tecumsehs, Kingston St. Lawrence, Bowmanville Victoria and Royal Oaks, Newcastle Beavers, Port Hope Silver Stars, Cobourg Travellers, Ottawa Mutuals, and early Toronto teams such as the Young Canadians and Dauntless. With one significant exception (Woodstock’s Charles Wood), these teams, both players and off-field leadership, consisted of those born in Canada or Great Britain, or having arrived at such a young age from the United States as to be considered essentially Canadian. They all learned the game in Canada. Even Bob Addy fit this mold. The 1854-1873 years were the beginning of baseball’s regular media coverage, and the tail end of proto-modern experiments from which regularity and modernism emerged. What does this mean? From a reverse historical engineering process, based on Canadian independence of play and operation between 1854 and 1873, a Canadian claim to be co-evolving North American participants in the game’s creative process is valid. If driven by American leadership in the proto-modern phase, we would not have expected to see that engagement so abruptly disappear in the 1854 to 1873 period. Recordings of the proto-modern era in Canada, though limited, show that the makeup of its baseball proponents generally matches the profile of those playing or organizing between 1854 and 1873. Finally, the remnants of the proto-modern period after 1854 consist largely of distinct but fading local interpretations of baseball. In one Canadian case it was even labeled as such. The roots of proto-modern games were in folk baseball play from England and Europe. Each region in North America experimented with variations on this play, from which the New York version ultimately succeeded. The arrival of itinerant American professionals in Canada only began in 1872 but was a significant minority until 1875. Canadian integration in a majority American baseball enterprise (the International Association) did not occur until 1877. Until then Canadians, except for adopting the New York game like everyone else, were creative masters in their own, and the larger, baseball domain.

15 Robert Douglas, the ballplaying and younger brother of Charles Wood’s wife Joanna, was a Woodstock saddler and harness maker who died in early 1872, possibly as a result of complications arising from a baseball accident in 1870 (London Free Press, July 9, 1870). He crashed into a teammate and was concussed, and may have suffered other physical injury. He played for the Young Canadians throughout the 1860s and early ’70s. His young widow, Sarah Jane, was just 25 and they had three young sons. The daughter of prominent local auctioneer and bailiff Samuel Burgess, she married Robert when she was 17. Her older brother Marenus was in the lineup of the Woodstock team playing the 11-a-side Canadian game in 1860. Young people meeting at the baseball diamond was obviously a custom with deep roots. Sarah remarried a year and a half after Robert’s death, and had three more sons, but she herself was dead by July 1878. She was buried under the Douglas name in Innerkip, northeast of Woodstock. Such are the short, marginally documented, but baseball-infused lives of long ago.

16 Hamilton Evening Times, August 24, 1864.

17 “The Base Ball Tournament at Detroit,” Hamilton Evening Times, August 10, 1867.

18 John Alexander MacDonald, Troublous Times in Canada: A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 (Toronto: W.S. Johnston and Co., 1910), 57. “Private Shuttleworth, of the 13th, had a narrow and extraordinary escape. While he was in the act of firing, the muzzle of his rifle was shot into by a Fenian musket ball and torn open.”

19 Recalling the events of that season many years later (Toronto Evening Telegram, September 27, 1923), Guelph ballplayer William Sunley described for reporter C.O. Knowles the second of the two games in which Guelph and Woodstock met that year. Guelph, he said, lost 38-28 [actually 36-28]. He then described the unusual circumstances: “… the game was lost owing to the absence of Mr. Nichols, the catcher on account of family affliction.” The box score of the game, noting Alfred Feast’s role as Guelph scorer and William Shuttleworth’s acclaimed duty as umpire, makes it clear, however, that James Nichols did play in the second game.

20 “A Shoemaker, Doing a Small Business in Dundas, Committed Suicide Because of Dull Trade and a Bad Wife,” (Canadian Statesman, September 2, 1869).

21 The peculiar Canadian Illustrated News drawing (September 11, 1875) of the Hamilton old-timers game was probably the last game in which William Shuttleworth, then 41, played.

22 Bryan D. Palmer, A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979).