Cricket 1914

No. io, V o l. I. SATURDAY, JUNE 6, 1914. P r ic e 3 d. One of the Younger Brigade. G a r n e t M o r l e y L e e . T h e days are past when from a score or more of N otting­ hamshire villages there was an annual exodus in the spring­ time of men who "worked a t their trade during the winter, and departed soon after the coming of the swallows to pro­ fessional cricket engagements all over the United Kingdom and even across the A tlantic. Some go now ; but they are few compared w ith the bands of those days. The decav of village industries and the concentration of the workers in factories account for this. Just as the district about K irk- heaton and Lascelles Hall produced cricketers of ability in numbers, so did such Notts townships as Sutton-in-Ashfield, Calverton, and others ; and the reason was the same— boys made up for lost time spent in cricket by working late, when it was too dark to see the ball, and the constant prac­ tice they obtained b y this arrangement made them pro­ ficient to a degree beyond th at attained by the village youth elsewhere. It used to be said that nearly every county side had a Notts-born man or two in it. A few of those who appeared for other countries were Lockwood, Sharpe, and Bow lev, for S u rre y ; George and Joseph Bean and Guttridge, for Sussex ; Walter Wright, for K e n t ; Gregg, for Gloucester­ shire ; Soar, for Hants ; A rthur Smith, for Lancashire ; Clarke, for M iddlesex; and Wheeler, for Leicestershire. Briggs hardly counts, for he belonged to the midland shire only by the accident of birth. Not all of these were fliers, though all were useful men ; and of course there were scores of others who never attained county honours. Nowadays the best of the county’s cricketers stay at home, in spite of a recent reduction in the Trent Bridge ground staff. It would have been a p ity had Lee sought other fields, for Notts had the credit and the cost of his early education, and he should be a big asset to them in the days to come. Indeed, he is already so ; but one fancies that the best has scarcely been seen of him yet. Garnet Morley Lee was born at Calverton on June 7, 1887, was engaged on the Trent Bridge staff while quite a youth, and appeared for the county’s Second X I in 1909, when, figuring for the first time in the Minor Counties’ championship, it came out on top of the Northern Division, but lost to Glamorgan in the senii-final deciding round. His best score that season was 93 v. Northumberland at Trent Bridge, and his average for 13 innings was exactly 20.