The Cricket Statistician No 195

35 (not then a current first-class cricketer) is included Charlton very occasionally fielded three first-class cricketers (Leary, Lucas and Ufton, or Leary, Lucas and Stewart). I used to watch football at Watford fairly regularly around that time. They were my local League team, although not the one that I supported, and I remember seeing Denis Foreman jumping up into the arms of a taller team mate (maybe right-half Don Bates?) having scored a vital late winning goal at Vicarage Road towards the end of 1957/58 season. Four days later Brighton clinched the Third Division South Championship, and their first ever promotion, beating Watford (again!) 6-0. (On the same day Sussex, without Bates and Foreman, had fielded at Fenner’s while future captain Ted Dexter had made 114 for Cambridge University.) Ten years later the number of first-class cricketers (past, present or future) playing in the 1967/68 Football League season had fallen to 14. Now of course the overlap between the seasons, and financial considerations, means that there is nobody combining a first-class and Football League career. The last man to perform this feat was Phil Neale (Worcestershire and Lincoln City) during the period from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Keith Barker, currently playing for Hampshire, came close. He appeared in 12 League Two matches for Rochdale in 2006/07 and made his first-class debut for Warwickshire in June 2009. Detailed lists of first-class cricketers who have appeared in the Football League, compiled by Kit Bartlett and Michael Featherstone, were published in issues number 41, 43, 44, 46 and 49 of The Cricket Statistician. Ernest John Plantagenet Cassan by Stephen Hill and Barry Phillips Stephen Hill and Barry Phillips (authors of the ‘Somerset Cricketers’ series) have been researching the lives of the cricketers who appeared for Somerset during the period between their formation at the end of the 1875 season and their eventual acceptance as a first-class county. 84 men played for Somerset during the ‘wilderness years’, but never appeared for the county in first-class matches. The following biography is an extract from ‘Somerset Cricketers 1876-1890: The Rise to First-Class Status’, which the authors published in March this year. Any members wishing to know more about the early years of Somerset cricket or the book, which is available in a strictly limited edition, can contact Barry Phillips by email: bpwg@sky.com The most interesting aspect of Ernest Cassan’s life is certainly not his history of employment. He rarely, if ever, did a day’s work. It is the manner of his death that caught the headlines, though the reasons behind his demise were skirted around in newspaper reports. He deserves to have those contributing factors spelt out, so that we can grasp why he took his own life, and understand that the verdict that he had committed ‘suicide by shooting himself in the head during a fit of temporary insanity’ glossed over the tragedy of it all. Because, behind it all there lies a touching and unconventional love story. Ernest was born on 17 August 1835 in Bruton, where his father, Stephen Hyde Cassan,