Australia were 500 for 6 at The Oval in 1884, and nine players had already bowled for England, when the captain, Lord Harris, turned to his wicket-keeper, Alfred Lyttelton. WG Grace put on the gloves, and Lyttelton took 4 for 19 with his underarm bowling. But then, the multi-talented Lyttelton was used to excelling in different fields: by this stage he had already played in an FA Cup Final, become the first man to play for England at cricket and football, and gained Oxford Blues in cricket, football, real tennis, athletics and racquets. He managed all this before retiring from sport aged 28, in order to concentrate on his career in law and politics.

Still, for all his sporting success, he never captained England – unlike Tip Foster, born 21 years later in 1878. Foster remains the only man to have captained England at cricket and football, and still holds the record for the highest score by a Test debutant (287 at the SCG in 1903). Like Lyttelton, Foster’s sporting career was restricted by his career outside sport: he turned down many cricketing opportunities in order to focus on his business commitments.

If before the Second World War professionalism might have helped the dual sportsman, by the time of Watson in the 1950s it was definitely a hindrance. Better pay may have helped players to sustain two sporting careers, but the pay was soon followed by other effects of professionalism, many of which affected amateurs just as much, and which made doubling up much harder. Longer seasons and more frequent tours abroad are often cited as consequences of professionalism that have led to the decline of the dual international. But there was probably never some golden age when the different sporting seasons fitted neatly into contiguous parts of the calendar.

Cricket tours were happening from the 19th century onwards, and summer football tours are not just an invention of rapacious 21st-century chairmen. The difference was that in the 19th and early-20th century, it was easier to pick and choose matches and tours, both domestically and internationally. England matches in all sports had a much more fluid cast of players, and much less of a “Team England” approach. Over time, more definite competition structures developed. Cups and one-off challenge matches declined in importance. Leagues and series assumed more importance, and required a more settled and stable team. This probably had more of an impact on the ability to play two sports at once than the regular seasons overlapping. After Compton played his first full season of Test cricket in the English summer of 1938, there was a tour that winter to South Africa. He turned down the chance of touring in order to play football for Arsenal, but failed to hold down a place in the Arsenal first team that season. Out in South Africa his contemporaries, Len Hutton and Bill Edrich, established themselves in the Test batting line-up and played in the famous Timeless Test at Durban in March 1939. But skipping the tour had no long-term consequences for Compton’s cricketing career. He was back in the team for the first Test against West Indies the following summer.

One can romanticise the dual international too much. In general, the greater professionalism that prevents the dual international has led to more consistently high standards across most sports, and to players being rewarded with the wealth created by their hard work and talent. And whilst the dual sportsmen thrilled the sporting public, when their careers ended many of them struggled to cope. In The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald describes the American footballer Tom Buchanan as “one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at 21 that everything afterward savours of anti-climax.” It is an apt line for many great sportsman, and more so for some of these dual internationals, even if some of their excellence felt unlimited.

Compton’s biographer says that life could hardly fail to be an anti-climax after such a dramatic career, while his son rather wistfully informs us that he felt as though his father belonged to the nation, not to his family. CB Fry suffered with mental-health problems and perhaps never came to terms with the fact that his career in politics and journalism was not as successful as that in sport. Stoddart and Shrewsbury both killed themselves, Stoddart after his career was over and Shrewsbury as his was coming to an end. Perhaps in some ways the demise of the dual sportsman is a good thing, as it forces even the most talented players into following the routines and the practices of the team, and to recognise a limit to talent. Still, there is something to be said for the thrill of an era when a player could take a hat-trick one day and score one the next, and when the impossible dreams of childhood were made possible by a lucky few.