History of Bucks CCC

Wycombe only three years earlier with its fine words about ‘securing enough new members to put the Club on a sound footing’. Match expenses, which had been running at an average of £270 a year, had still to be tackled, and it did not help the cause that in 1911 the county team was required to play ten matches rather than eight including a tour to Wales, where new opponents were Glamorgan, Carmarthenshire and Monmouthshire. Nevertheless, with a strong amateur element in the team, the cost of the match programme that year was contained to £173 and the treasurer was able to go to the Annual Meeting in February 1912 and report a more modest deficit on the year of £70 2s 0d, adding that he had reason to believe that the position would improve. He was proved right: in 1912 and 1913, despite gate receipts that were now down to £10 for the season, the club could point to a modest excess of income over expenditure. Commenting on this ‘absurdly low’ figure for admissions to county matches the handbook report echoed the sentiment that ‘it seems a great pity that the general public cannot be induced to take a little more interest in county cricket, even if it is second-class.’ The committee could reflect that Bucks was not alone in finding that the public was now less easily wooed to spend its time watching cricket. The years of struggle The dwindling interest in minor county cricket in the early years of the new century was reflected in press reporting. No longer do we find local papers regularly devoting long columns to the deeds of the county team, and piecing together match scores becomes a more frustrating task. Moreover, for Bucks, the financial struggles were running parallel with those on the field, where it was becoming an ever harder task to find eleven men who could compete. By 1904 Charles Cobb had retired, Percy de Paravicini, though still nominally the captain, was playing infrequently, Nash was dead and Gresson’s best days were past, though he soldiered on until 1907. There was a great weight on the ageing shoulders of Mat Wright, who could still find himself bowling 40 overs in an innings - and they were now of six balls. The professional support for Wright could make no pretensions to the class of George Nash. There was all too little amateur talent coming through, and fickle commitment to the cause meant that there was seldom a settled side. One who was now enjoying his best days with the county was FN Bird. A product of Trinity College Dublin, Frederick Bird had first played for Bucks in 1896 at the age of 20. He was always an outstanding fielder – he had taken the disputed boundary catch against Oxfordshire in his first season, but his intermittent appearances at first earned him few runs. However, his form improved and he became one of the mainstays of the batting so that by the time he moved away from the area in 1907 his 49 matches had brought 2,043 runs at an average of 27.42 with two centuries, the highest 133 against Berkshire at Slough in 1905. A batsman with strokes all round the wicket, Bird tasted first-class cricket when he played half a dozen games for Gloucestershire in 1899 and 1900, and he appeared in a further ten matches for Northamptonshire, when he held the post of chaplain at Wellingborough School, having been ordained in 1908. He was briefly a housemaster at Cranleigh before becoming headmaster of Lowestoft College, when he turned out 32 The years of struggle FN Bird