Double Headers

73 Other instances in the British Isles first-class match he scored just 2 and 10, and took 0-55 and 1-38. This appearance makes him the third and last cricketer to play in both a county double-header and a club double-header in England. 63 After 1929 the Free Foresters’ matches against the two Universities gradually moved apart on the fixture list. They were a week apart in 1930, three weeks apart in 1931, and nearly a month apart in 1932. For most of the rest of the club’s first-class life, the matches were usually one or two weeks apart, with the game at Oxford generally (though by no means always) preceding that at Cambridge. Thus there was never again any instance of simultaneous matches. 1962 was the last season of the regular first-class matches between the Free Foresters and the Universities. The games were played as usual in 1963, in the belief that they were first-class 64 , but for reasons I have not been able to establish (could it have had anything to do with the abolition of the amateur/professional distinction after the 1962 season?), they were subsequently ruled by MCC to have been ‘not first-class’. This seems to have triggered off some reaction at the Universities, particularly at Cambridge, for in 1964 – for the first time since 1908 – that University had no fixture with the Free Foresters. The Universities alternated fixtures with the Foresters from 1964 to 1967, but in that year Cambridge played their last three-day match against them. Oxford took rather longer to sever the ties, continuing with a three-day fixture in most years until 1983. For some reason, Oxford’s matches against the Free Foresters in 1964 and 1968 were deemed to be first-class: perhaps this is a bigger mystery than why the other games after 1963 were not. 65 Simultaneous matches by Festival XIs bearing the same name Between the Wars and for many years after the Second World War, the English season customarily came to an end with a number of week- long Festivals, held usually in the first or second week of September in seaside resorts such as Scarborough, Folkestone, Hastings, Torquay, and Blackpool. Kingston-upon-Thames 66 was a notable geographical exception. The Festival matches were played ‘properly’, but in a more relaxed atmosphere than the competitive games of the rest of the season, as they were usually of no wider consequence than providing entertainment for the holiday crowds and, one suspects, for the players as well. The teams involved in these games were usually scratch sides brought together for the occasion, playing under a variety of names to reflect some 63 The only others to do so are Willie Quaife, who played for Warwickshire against MCC in both 1895 and 1896, as well as against Derbyshire at Derby in 1919, and H.D.G.Leveson Gower, who played for MCC against Oxford University in 1898 and against Yorkshire in 1907, as well as in The Oval leg of Surrey’s 1909 double-header. 64 They are listed as first-class fixtures in the Playfair Cricket Annual for 1963, and included in the principal fixture list printed in Wisden 1963. 65 The 1963 matches were retrospectively ruled ‘not-first-class’ by MCC in July 1963 (see Cricket Quarterly Vol 1 no. 4, page 167), but I have not researched any formal rulings for later years. Fixtures between the Free Foresters and Oxford and Cambridge Universities resumed in 1987 and 1988 respectively, though they have not continued in unbroken sequence since those dates, and have generally been one-day games. 66 See note 30 above.