Double Headers

49 The sixth game of Worcestershire’s county season was the Bank Holiday match against Warwickshire at Edgbaston. Of the ‘regulars’, Ernest Bale and Alfred Cliff were both selected for this game (thus maintaining their 100% appearance record for the season), along with Arthur Conway and Dick Burrows ; why and how Taylor, Bowley and Pearson negotiated an opt-out is not recorded. Other prime candidates for the side at Edgbaston were surely those who had appeared in three of the five earlier matches - Coventry, Fred Hunt, Tipper and James Turner, together with the Chilean- born, South African-raised brothers Maurice and Arthur Jewell. 48 But five of this six (all but Hunt) were amateurs, who could no doubt be picky as to where they spent their Bank Holiday. In the end, of these only Fred Hunt and James Turner - the latter named as captain - found themselves on the Edgbaston team-sheet. Six down, five places to fill. For reasons now lost - but presumably related to the earlier-stated wish to “develop such talent as would bring them in line with some of the first-class counties again” - the selectors decided to pick five men who hadn’t appeared for the county at all in 1919, rather than giving a further chance to any of those who had already made their county debuts earlier in the season without achieving striking success. All five of those selected were, inevitably, amateurs. Four of them had played no previous first-class cricket, while the fifth had played just a single game at that level, six years previously. Exactly how these five came to be chosen is a mystery. Frederick Abbott and Rupert Cave-Rogers 49 were both 17-year-olds from Malvern College, though their school records for the season - respectively, second and eighth in the batting averages, and not featuring at all in the bowling averages - did not immediately suggest that they were demanding a trial in the county side. However, both had done well in a match for the school against Herefordshire a week before the game at Edgbaston, Abbott scoring 68 and Cave-Rogers 34 (including only one single). The Herefordshire side included H.K.Foster, and I suspect that his influence weighed strongly in the final decision to include them in the XI for Edgbaston. Both also played for the county in a one-day game against Wolverhampton on the Saturday before the Edgbaston game (2 August), but with considerably less success: Cave-Rogers made 4, and Abbott a duck. This suggests that the side for Edgbaston had already been picked before the start of the Bank Holiday weekend; but sadly, local newspapers are silent on the when and how of the selection of the Worcestershire side. Of the other amateurs, 19-year-old Herbert Isaac had been at Harrow School, and played in the wartime match against Eton in 1917 (with little success), but his name does not appear in the school’s averages or reports in Wisden for this or any other year, indicating that he was never a regular in the School XI. He was the son and nephew respectively of two former 48 J.E.V. Jewell, who played for Surrey II in 1909 (see page 18), was another brother of this pair. 49 CricketArchive names this player as R.A.C.Rogers, saying that he adopted the surname Cave-Rogers later in his life. But he is named as Cave-Rogers in the Malvern College averages in the 1919 and 1920 editions of Wisden , which indicates that that was the name he used at the time of the match at Edgbaston in August 1919. He shared his exact date of birth - 27 May 1902 - with one of Warwickshire’s schoolboy selections, Edward Hewetson. Warwickshire in 1919