Double Headers

60 Jewell taking a career-best 7-56). Worcestershire added 102-7 declared, and Warwickshire – needing a theoretical 145 to win – finished on 70-2 off 15 overs. Worcestershire’s nine first-class games in 1919 produced three defeats and six draws. Not a great return, but the club evidently felt that they had turned a corner, for at the end of the Cricket Festival on 30 August the Committee announced that they would re-enter the County Championship in 1920. And onwards ... Worcestershire’s return to the Championship in 1920 saw them finish 15th out of 16th, with only the hapless Derbyshire (17 defeats and one abandonment in 18 matches) below them. Warwickshire were up to 12th for that season, but back almost to the bottom (16th out of 17: Glamorgan had now joined the list of first-class counties) in 1921. There followed a long period in which neither county exactly set the Championship alight, positions in the lower half (and often the lower third) being commonplace for both right up to the Second World War. Until they finished 7th in 1939, Worcestershire’s best position in the interwar years was 10th in 1930, while Warwickshire’s 8th in 1925 was their only top-half finish until 1933. Fourth place in 1934 proved to be a false dawn, and they were back into the double-figure placings for the last four pre-war years. There was never any question of repeating the double-header venture from 1919. With Worcestershire back in the Championship, the two counties could arrange full, competitive matches without the need for, or threat of, any doubling-up of dates with other fixtures. From 1920 they resumed the pattern of playing each other twice a season in the Championship, but the days of meeting over the August Bank Holiday were now almost completely behind them. Playing Derbyshire over the holiday, which had perhaps been just an unexpected necessity in the fixture list for 1919, became an established fixture for Warwickshire from then onwards, the tradition only ending in 1959. Meanwhile Worcestershire in 1920 began a tradition of their own of meeting Essex over the holiday. I said ‘almost’ in the second sentence of the previous paragraph, because as already mentioned, in 1936 and 1937 the fixture list reverted to its pre- WW1 pattern of Bank Holiday fixtures, and for two years Warwickshire again met Worcestershire over the August Bank Holiday – in 1936 at Edgbaston, in 1937 at New Road. In addition, in 1936 Worcestershire’s home fixture with Warwickshire was played over the Whit Monday Bank Holiday, but that was a one-off. In all other seasons, the matches between the two counties appeared in the programme wherever they would fit, rather than being tied to a particular date, or even to a particular month. As for the players in the Edgbaston game, it has to be admitted that none of them ever achieved any great cricketing triumphs, though some of them had their moments. None ever played in a Test match, or even came close. For two of Warwickshire’s debutants, Santall and Smart, the game was the first in lengthy careers in which, however – and without meaning to be unkind – they never rose above the status of ‘good, steady county Warwickshire in 1919