Double Headers

78 The first is outwardly very similar to the Surrey instance in 1909. In Wisden for 1938, the fixture list for the coming season records that on 25 June 1938 Sussex were due to start games against both Kent at Tunbridge Wells and Cambridge University at Hove. Sussex regularly played home matches against one or both of the Universities, so the latter may be regarded as an ‘established’ fixture. Its inclusion in the Wisden fixture list suggests that the Hove match was regarded as first-class at the time - or at least that it was not, at that stage, definitely not first-class. But by the time the season started it had been established – how, I have been unable to find out – that the game was definitely not a first-class match 68 , and so it was excluded from the end- of-season averages for 1938. There is no scorecard of it, nor even a potted score, in Wisden 1939. 69 As Wisden and many other sources tell us, the match against Kent was a rain-spoiled draw. But details of the match at Hove are more elusive. At the time of writing, the scorecard of the game is not even available on CricketArchive. But fortunately the match was given decent coverage in The Times and The Cricketer , with detailed reports on all three days of play (25-27-28 June) in the former, and the full scorecards in the latter. A potted score is as follows: Sussex 116 (V.C.Humphrey 39; W.R.Rees-Davies 4-23, J.V.Wild 4-24) and 329 (G.A.Collins 85, R.G.Stainton 62, J.C.Whitehead 39; M.A.C.P.Kaye 4-80) beat Cambridge University 293 (P.A.Gibb 99, N.W.D.Yardley 75, F.G.Mann 41) and 86 (A.G.Tuppin 6-38) by 66 runs. The Sussex players named in that score may not be too familiar, but there were at least three now-well-known names in their XI – George Cox (junior), bowler John Nye, and an unexpected guest, the 17-year-old South African N.B.F. ‘Tufty’ Mann. Of the Sussex XI, six had already played first-class cricket for the county, and a seventh (Collins) was to do so the following year. On the other hand, two – Whitehead and Humphrey – never played in a first-class match, while Tufty Mann did not begin his prestigious first- class career for another 18 months, and never played a first-class match for an English county side. 70 The Cambridge side was at full strength, being identical with the XI that drew the Varsity Match a week later. In a further parallel with the Surrey 1909 instance, Sussex included a ‘Grand Old Man’ in their team, in the form of 54-year-old John Mathews, who had played 40 matches for the county between 1909 and 1930. One of county cricket’s more durable, if not conspicuously successful, 68 “The encounter will not be included in averages and has been arranged at the urgent wish of the Cantabs”. From In the Pavilion by Sir Home Gordon, in The Cricketer , 7 May 1938, page 34. 69 Wisden 1939 acknowledges the fixture in the summary of Cambridge’s matches in 1938, where it gives the result but not any scores, and appends the note “This match was not regarded as a first-class fixture” – a fact confirmed a few pages earlier when Wisden expressly states that performances in the match at Hove had been ignored in the preparation of the University averages. ( Wisden 1939, pp 624 and 612 respectively.) There is no reference whatsoever to the match in the section of the Almanack dealing with Sussex’s season. 70 Although George Mann and Tufty Mann opposed each other in this 1938 game, neither dismissed the other in either innings, so unfortunately there was no early instance here of Mann’s inhumanity to Mann (to quote John Arlott’s fine bon mot ). Other instances in the British Isles