Double Headers

74 feature that was common to all, or most, of the players in each side, but not to their opponents. 67 These names might have been geographical (North, South, East, West), or social (Gentlemen, Players), or sometimes a combination of the two (e.g. ‘Gentlemen of the South’). Or they might have taken the name of the team’s organiser (e.g. H.D.G.Leveson Gower’s XI, longtime participants at the Scarborough Festival). In later years, as overseas players became more numerous within the county and league ranks, sides were also put together of English-based cricketers who originally hailed from ‘anywhere but England’, under the name of ‘Commonwealth XI’. The names of these scratch sides were generally titles of convenience only. Unless otherwise stated, I have here used the team-names as given in the match-reports in Wisden. Other variations of the accepted team names might equally well have been chosen in at least some cases (e.g. to take a random example, all 22 participants in the Gentlemen v Players match at Folkestone in 1934 played for southern counties, so the match might equally well have been styled as ‘Gentlemen of the South v Players of the South’). As we will see shortly, in several cases there is not agreement on team-names in all sources. In these circumstances there was no prima facie reason why two Festival XIs bearing exactly the same name (as recorded in Wisden ) should not be playing simultaneously at two different grounds, and there were at least four instances when this happened. In fact in three of these instances, both sides in the two games bore the same names. These four instances are of course quite different from those that have been described in this book so far. In these earlier instances, the double- heading side was representing a defined and established organisation, either a county or a club. In the Festival instances, however, the double- heading sides were not representing anyone apart from themselves, on a one-off basis and only for the duration of the match concerned. The four Festival instances were as follows: Season Play dates Fixture Venue Winners 1934 5-6-7 Sept Gentlemen v Players Folkestone Gents 5-6-7 Sept Gentlemen v Players Scarborough Drawn 1948 4-6 Sept South v North Hastings South 4-6-7 Sept South v North Kingston Drawn 1952 6-8-9 Sept South v North Kingston South 6-8-9 Sept South v Rest of England Hastings Drawn 1957 4-5-6 Sept England XI v Commonwealth XI Hastings Eng XI 67 To judge from the pre-season fixture lists as published in Wisden , it would appear that the team names were decided long before individual players were invited to the Festivals, though it is less clear whether the players were selected in order to fit the team names, or whether the organisers simply fitted the available players to the pre-selected team-names as best they could. For the ‘Gentlemen v Players’ fixtures, and those involving Commonwealth XIs, the former was no doubt the case, but for other fixtures I am not so sure. Other instances in the British Isles