Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

seminal date. He was a good golfer; he excelled at athletic events that drew on his strength and stamina; and he was a long-distance swimmer of considerable standing. While it was the physical demands of these sports that appealed to him, he also enjoyed the more leisurely pursuits of bowls, billiards and rifle shooting and was good enough to carry off the prizes in many local competitions. Frank Sugg was indeed an allround sportsman par excellence , taking part in competitive activity throughout the year. He looked after himself, as the modern phrase has it, by following a regime of regular exercise throughout his sporting career and beyond. It is notable that, in cricket, where we have comprehensive information, Sugg hardly ever missed a match through injury. Intelligent and ambitious, from an early age Frank was keen to do well in life. He wanted the good things that money could buy. Very much a realist, Frank knew that, however successful he was, the financial rewards for a professional sportsman would be modest and his future never secure. In 1890 an established player with Lancashire – who were better employers than many counties – could expect to earn £3 a week, plus match pay and talent money, during the season. 2 A sportsman’s career could be cut short at any time by injury, loss of form or the whims of a club’s committee, leaving him without any means of support. At an early age Frank had shown a talent for business and in 1888 he made his first serious venture into the commercial world by establishing, with his brother Walter, also an allround sportsman and professional cricketer, in his case with Derbyshire, a sports outfitters’ business with its first shop in Liverpool. The business grew in the years up to the Great War when, as Frank Sugg Ltd, it was one of the leading businesses of its type, manufacturing and retailing a wide range of clothes and equipment for different sports and outdoor pastimes. In the harsher economic climate that prevailed after the War, the company, like many similar businesses, ran into difficulties, and its eventual collapse, combined with the failure of a number of more speculative ventures, cost Frank much grief and money. As will be explained in a later chapter an offshoot of Frank Sugg Ltd, HHB Sugg Ltd, run initially by Walter Sugg’s son, continued to trade until 2001. 8 Not Merely a Smiter 2 A.W.Ledbrooke , Lancashire County Cricket, 1864-1953 , Phoenix House, 1954, p 272.