A Game Sustained

112 Struggling through to the end: 1918 while one of the Saltaire team turned up for a match with a temperature of 102 degrees and was sent home. Bankfoot and Keighley were also short due to illness. During the summer, more matches were played to raise money for charities all round the county. In Hull, a match was arranged for Bank Holiday Monday for the local Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) Hospital. Some 1,000 tickets had been sold by late July and over £60 raised. Over 4,000 tickets were sold for a game between Skipton Police and Skipton Tradesmen, and between £70 and £80 was raised for Skipton Wounded Soldiers Outing Fund. Also in August, a game of baseball was played on Scarborough cricket ground between two American sides in aid of the British Sailors’ War Orphans, followed later by a military tattoo for a prisoners of war fund. As the summer went on there was a growing sense of optimism that there might be an end in sight to the conflict. Against this background, the Yorkshire Post reflected that cricket was: approaching nearer to the normal state than it has been in the intervening years...The arrangement of four days of August holiday matches at Scarborough, and of three games, each of two days, for the Yorkshire County Eleven, can be taken as evidence of the changing circumstances, and one may add, of the desire to see a gradual return to the normal. 72 The Bank Holiday cricket was awaited with anticipation, with Yorkshire appearing in Leeds and the semi-finals of the Priestley Cup competition taking place, all games in aid of charity. In the Cup semi-finals some 8,200 saw Bankfoot beat Pudsey St Lawrence, and 5,800 watched Saltaire overcome Baildon Green where S.F.Barnes made 168, ‘a fine if not faultless’ innings. Later, in what was described as the ‘chief event of the war-time cricket season in Yorkshire’, Park Avenue hosted the Priestley Cup final. The match turned out to be a tie, watched by 13,000 people, with gate receipts of £406, both records for a one-day game. The game had to be