Lives in Cricket No 15 - Michael Falcon

Michael Falcon continued to play social cricket alongside his county commitments. He dominated what was entitled ‘Honingham Week’, 15 turning out for R.T.Fellowes’ XI in three matches in rural Norfolk with Test stars such as Sid Pegler, Bernard Bosanquet and Archie MacLaren amongst his opponents. He missed two of Norfolk’s Championship matches: once because he was representing the Gentlemen at Lord’s, but, remarkably, he was also absent from the Challenge Match as he was touring the USA with the Incogniti club. This might seem in the light of today’s priorities as something of a dereliction of duty by Falcon, but in those more carefree days an opportunity to travel abroad was too good to resist. Indeed it was the only overseas tour he was able to make during his long career, apart from brief trips across the Irish Sea with Cambridge University in 1908 and 1910. From the published description, the Incog tour was an elaborate affair, starting off with a dinner on 26 August, at the house of the captain, Col Cleveland Greenway, at 27 Ovington Square, Chelsea. The touring party comprised seventeen overall, three ladies (players’ wives), a professional umpire and thirteen players, nine of whom had played first-class cricket. The captain was 48, but most of the others were ‘young blades’, mostly well under 30. They were seen off from Waterloo by a group of eleven, including H.D.G. ‘Shrimp’ Leveson Gower. They arrived back in Plymouth on 6 October. The standard of the cricket was high – two of the matches were against Philadelphia representative sides 16 – and the tour was one of the last occasions that North American cricket flickered in the public spotlight before slipping into obscurity. (At one point, Incogniti were accounted by their hosts as ‘the most exclusive cricket club in the world’ which perhaps hints at the Anglophile mindset of American cricket at the time.) Michael Falcon played in all six fixtures, four of which the Incogniti won, with one drawn and one lost. He had mixed fortunes with the bat, scoring a century against Merion, the leading club in Philadelphia, but failing to reach fifty in any other innings. He was more successful with the ball, being the leading wicket-taker, with 38 victims at an average of 13.11. Falcon’s personal highlight of the tour was in the final Taking Over the Reins at Norfolk: 1911-1914 33 15 Honingham is a Norfolk village near East Dereham not easy to get to, even in the twenty-first century. 16 Three matches played by Philadelphian sides, against an Australian touring team in June of the same year, are classified as first-class.