150 in 80 minutes and the game was lost by six wickets with five minutes to spare.” When Jim Hutchinson died on November 7 2000 he was 22 days short of his 104th birthday. He remained lucid to the end, a treasure house of information about those distant days, related from the comfort of his armchair at his home in Thurnscoe, between Barnsley and Rotherham. He had fond memories of the Bank Holiday matches. “I enjoyed making a hundred at the County Ground but I sometimes wondered what the Warwickshire players and supporters felt about coming to Derby,” he said. “But they had a good team, with Willie Quaife and Bob Wyatt scoring plenty of runs against us. Harry Howell had a bit of pace and Danny Mayer was a real pro – a tireless fast medium bowler who had a lot of work to do. Both teams got on well and one or two of them enjoyed the get-togethers over the holidays. There was always a bit of banter between the spectators and in the field at Derby you could sometimes pick up the Brummie accents in the crowd.” At least Hutchinson was soon to see the last of Quaife. In 1928 he was allowed to pick his retirement match for his only appearance of the summer and he chose Derbyshire at Edgbaston on 4, 6 and 7 August. Parsons made 114 for Warwickshire but it was Quaife’s day; 115 made in 260 minutes at the age of 56 years 140 days. Warwickshire declared at 564 for seven but although the follow-on was enforced, the match was drawn. In 60 matches against Derbyshire, Quaife scored 3,161 runs, average 44.52, with six hundreds. By now another rivalry was beginning to develop. Derbyshire won at Edgbaston over Whitsun in 1929 despite an unbeaten hundred from Wyatt. The mercurial Tommy Mitchell baffled most of the other Warwickshire batsmen with his leg breaks, to which he would soon add the googly. Beginning with 1929 he was to take a hundred wickets in ten consecutive seasons, 104 of them at 19.02 in 22 matches against Warwickshire. As Wyatt averaged nearly 45 against Derbyshire the pair soon became worthy adversaries and they toured Australia in 1932-33, whenWyatt was Jardine’s vice-captain. Mitchell played under Wyatt’s captaincy against New Zealand at Auckland in 1933 and Australia at Headingley when Bradman made 304 in 1934. Mitchell, an outspoken, bespectacled character, enjoyed his best season in 1935 and was controversially selected for the second Test against South Africa. Leather-jackets, the larvae of the daddy-long-legs, had been at the Lord’s pitches and Wyatt had been impressed by Mitchell’s bowling at Edgbaston that season. He felt he could win the match for England but the selectors wanted an allrounder, Walter Robins. After a long meeting Wyatt got his way but the outcome was disastrous. South Africa won by 157 runs, Mitchell’s three wickets in the match costing 164 runs. Pelham Warner, the chairman of the selectors, felt that Wyatt relied too heavily on Mitchell and seemed obsessed by him. Wyatt told a different story, challenging the unanimity of the opposition to him and saying he had particularly outspoken support from Percy Perrin, another selector. Wyatt believed that with the match lost, Warner tried to lay the blame on his captain by not accepting any corporate responsibility of selection. The frustration spilled out on to the field. Mitchell said Wyatt wanted him to bowl at the leg stump from the pavilion end. “I refused,” said Mitchell. “He was telling me how to bowl and I didn’t like it. So I turned to him and said, ‘You couldn’t captain a box of bloody lead soldiers.” Mitchell had just bowled Siedle, who tried to hook a googly and missed. One of the umpires, Tiger Smith, said Breaching the Big Six 82