Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

looking for a wife. The surprise is that his choice fell upon a young girl – a minor – who lived a long way from Frank’s base in Liverpool, though we should remember that it was not all that unusual in Victorian times for men to marry much younger women. As to how the couple came to meet, a contemporary source suggests that it was at a county cricket match: ‘It was as a representative of Lancashire that Sugg discovered his wife as she admired his play in Brighton where Lancashire were playing Sussex in 1888.’ 61 This cannot be correct. Lancashire did indeed play Sussex at Hove 62 in 1888, but Frank was not in the team. He could not have been a ‘representative of Lancashire’ in any other capacity as, on the days of the match, Frank Sugg was appearing for England against the Australians at Kennington Oval. Certainly Lancashire would have liked Sugg to be in their team because they were emphatically beaten by nine wickets inside two days, having at one stage in their first innings been 28 for seven wickets. It is possible that the date is wrong in this account. Sugg certainly played in the corresponding fixture in 1887, the match starting on 22 August, and he acquitted himself well in Lancashire’s victory by four wickets. He scored 69 runs in each of Lancashire’s innings, top-scoring in the first, and in the Sussex second innings bowled a few overs and took a couple of catches. Frank was therefore prominent throughout the match and, handsome and athletic as he was, he could well have caught the eye of a young female spectator. If Amy was a spectator, it was no doubt with family members during a seaside holiday. But Amy was only 15 years old at the time of this game and it is hard to believe that any admiration that she may have felt for Frank or for his play in it could have led directly to a romance between the two. If Amy had an interest in cricket, it is possible that she was among the spectators at Gloucester, close to her home, in June 1888 when Lancashire were the visitors and when Frank scored a whirlwind 102 not out in the single day on which play was possible, and that it was at this match that Frank first met his future wife. If this were the beginning of the relationship, the courtship would have been a Marriage and Family 63 61 Joseph Stoddart, Men I Have Met , p 61. 62 The Sussex ground was at Hove, but was often identified as Brighton at the time, though that is of no consequence in this context.