Lives in Cricket No 15 - Michael Falcon

Chapter Five At His Peak: 1919-1929 The Great War interrupted Michael Falcon’s first-class and Minor Counties careers whilst they were at their height but, after his active service, he picked up as though there had been no hiatus and his starring years in the first-class game continued to around 1926, and in the Minor Counties Championship to around 1930. In 1919 and the early 1920s, he was supporting himself as an MP – not thought of then as a full-time job – and to a lesser extent as a barrister, being able to juggle his Parliamentary and constituency duties with his cricketing commitments without upsetting more than his most demanding political opponents. Following his defeat in the 1923 election and his decision to leave politics he was obliged to seek a new career. A former colleague from the House of Commons, Edward Strauss, 31 made the suggestion that he take up the selling of hops for the Strauss family firm, one of the larger businesses in the hop ‘market’, based in Borough High Street just south of London Bridge. This might seem a little mundane a career for a man of Falcon’s social standing, but it had the important feature that it was a business which largely took place in the autumn, thereby leaving plenty of time free for playing cricket in the summer. (According to his son, the brewers loved to talk cricket with Falcon when he made his ‘rounds’.) He was not the first famous cricketer to enter the hop business. Alfred Mynn, the great Kent cricketer of the nineteenth century, had pre-dated Falcon in the trade; nor was he the last as the Kent wicket-keeper W.H.V. ‘Hopper’ Levett also became involved in a similar career in the 1930s. The drawback of hop-selling was that it obliged Falcon to leave his beloved Norfolk and he found himself based in Havering-atte-Bower, a rather suburban village near Romford in Essex, where he lived in another manor house, Bedfords, built in 56 31 Strauss was Liberal MP for Abingdon from 1906 to 1910, and then represented various Southwark constituencies as a National Liberal or Liberal between 1910 and 1940. He was a ‘coupon’ Liberal in the 1918 election, and in those particular hustings, therefore, ‘on the same side’ as Falcon. Like other farming- related businesses, the Strauss firm ran into financial difficulties in the 1930s.