Double Headers

84 •Henry Marshal scored a century (105) on his first-class debut for Argentina in the game at Hurlingham over the New Year of 1927. Although sharing the unusual spelling of his surname, he is not related to the Alan Marshal who played for Surrey in 1909. •Frank Woolley scored 132 and took 6-50 and 4-38 at Dunedin over the New Year of 1930, to record the sixth and last ‘match double’ of his first-class career. •Patsy Hendren made scores of 223* and 254* for MCC in the games at Bridgetown and Georgetown (respectively) in 1930. •Edward Benson was dismissed ‘handled the ball’ for MCC in the match at Auckland in February 1930, though there was doubt at the time as to whether he actually touched the ball. •The programmed double-header in January 1974 sadly did not come about because rain prevented play on any of the three scheduled days at Castries. The match at Nairobi, with which it was due to be simultaneous, marked the only first-class appearance of J.L. (John) Hutton, son of Len and younger brother of Richard: he scored 12 and 39 batting at number 7, and – opening the bowling - took 1-32 and 1-15. Double-heading in Test cricket MCC on tour did not always play as ‘MCC’, of course: in Test Matches they were ‘England’. So as well as the dozen or so instances of simultaneous tour matches by sides styled as ‘MCC’, there is also the possibility, on simultaneous Test tours, of England playing a Test Match double-header. As the above listing indicates, the only chance for this to have occurred was in 1929/30. At the time, the status of the representative matches in New Zealand and the West Indies in 1929/30 was not 100% clear. Even Wisden in 1931 was not consistent. In its reports of the tours, the games in New Zealand were called ‘Test matches’, but those in the West Indies were referred to simply as ‘representative matches’, with the visiting team styled ‘MCC Team’ rather than ‘England’; yet Andrew Sandham’s 325 in the ‘representative match’ at Kingston in 1929/30 is listed in the records of ‘Great Individual Scores’ as having been made for “England v West Indies”. 76 It required the involvement of one of the leading statisticians of the day, E.L.Roberts, to secure consistency of approach to the ‘representative matches’ in the West Indies in 1929/30. 77 Thanks to his intervention, by the end of the 1930s those matches had finally and definitively entered the canon of Test matches, and as a result the visiting side was finally and definitively styled ‘England’ – whether or not that was how it was known when the games were actually played. So, having agreed that ‘England’ did indeed make simultaneous Test tours in 1929/30, were there occasions when games now styled as Test matches were scheduled for the same dates on both tours? 76 Wisden 1931 part 1 page 145. 77 See correspondence in The Cricketer 1938, on pages 30 and 63 Other instances involving British teams