The Cricket Statistician No 195

36 was the vicar. A graduate of Magdalen Hall, Oxford, Stephen Cassan had caused ructions in 1821 when, as a curate at Frome, he had eloped with Frances (née Ireland), known as Fanny, the daughter of the vicar, without obtaining consent to the match. There followed a vendetta against him, orchestrated by Rev Ireland, who regarded himself as the wronged party. Stephen’s licence to minister the sacraments was revoked, but in an extraordinary display of support, three-quarters of his former congregation boycotted the church services and a petition supporting him was signed by approximately five hundred parishioners. Perhaps these actions were instrumental in expediting his rehabilitation. A keen writer, who published biographies of various bishops, Rev Stephen Cassan was in his late-forties when Ernest, his fourth child, arrived. Stephen died, after a two-year struggle with severe mental health issues, when Ernest was only five years old. Stephen’s wife, Fanny, was married for a second time in 1844, to a widower, Edward Blair Michell, the brother of the principal of Magdalen Hall. Living with them was a young servant girl named Jane Fisher. Jane and the game of cricket would become the two abiding loves in the life of Ernest Cassan. Given his strong connections with Magdalen Hall, it was preordained that Ernest would be awarded a place there, after his education at King’s School, Bruton. Perhaps it was indolence that meant that he took seven years to complete his degree, accomplishing the feat of endurance in 1861, as he approached his twenty-seventh birthday. He played several times for Oxford University but only once in the Varsity match when, in 1859, he took a total of nine Cambridge wickets. The following year he was instrumental in re-establishing the Gentlemen of Somerset side, the precursor to Somerset County Cricket Club, taking eleven wickets in the match against Gentlemen of Devon. He would continue playing for the county until the 1878 season, after which he threw in his lot with Dorset. In the eleven matches he played for Somerset against principal opposition between 1876 & 1878, he took thirty-five wickets, a significant achievement given that Harry Evans and Frank Reed were the main bowlers and he was not always called upon to bowl. The wickets included two five-wicket hauls, both against Dorset. An avowed tailender, he averaged 7.11 with the bat. Through four decades, he remained active in club cricket and became somewhat of an institution at Lansdown CC. A description of his bowling technique (in the Bath Chronicle ) informs us of his skill in ‘sending down a slow to medium left round-arm delivery which required the utmost care on the part of the batsman’ and that ‘his left hand was paralysed, and he placed the ball in it with his right’. A faded image of him in the Lansdown CC team of 1863 shows his withered arm hanging limply, and it seems remarkable that he could have overcome his physical problems with such success. His enthusiastic pursuit, throughout his adult life, of shooting and fishing must equally have presented him with problems. He called an end to his playing days with Lansdown CC at the end of the 1899 season at the grand old age of sixty-three, at the same time stepping down from his role as a vice-president. The club rewarded him with honorary life membership. But what of his life? He later claimed that he had qualified as a barrister, but the evidence suggests otherwise. Perhaps he worked briefly as a young man in his stepfather’s solicitor’s practice in Bruton, but his life thereafter was given over entirely to leisure. Any positions of authority (such as his prominent role on the Lansdown CC committee or his spell as governor of King’s School, Bruton, from 1876 to 1878) were unrelated to business. Through it all, the family maid, Jane Fisher, whom he first met while a teenager, would be by his side,