Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

whirlwind affair since the wedding took place only a few months later. Anyhow, whatever the date on which the couple first met, Frank was able, between his various cricket and business commitments, to meet Amy and her family enough times to satisfy himself that she was the wife for him and, more to the point, to satisfy Amy’s father, George Smith, a businessman in the woollen textiles industry, that he had the means adequately to support her. In consenting to the marriage of his 17-year-old daughter, Mr Smith must have been impressed by Frank’s qualities and prospects. The wedding was in the bride’s parish church, St Cyr’s at Stonehouse, with Frank’s brother Walter the best man. After the reception, the bride’s father provided a spectacular firework display to celebrate the occasion and the whole village was ‘quite en fete’. After a honeymoon in London, the couple made their first home in rural North Meols, near Southport in West Lancashire. They lived in Southport for much of Frank’s first-class cricket career, but around the turn of the century, they moved to Walton, by now one of Liverpool’s sprawling suburbs, perhaps so that Frank could be closer to his place of business in the centre of town. The Suggs lived at 2 Albert Drive, 63 a substantial brick-built property on a corner plot, these days converted into flats. While many Victorian properties remain in the area, the extensive rebuilding of this part of Liverpool would make it unrecognisable to the Suggs. The Suggs moved out of Liverpool at some point, probably after the First World War, to Waterloo, a district of the present Liverpool conurbation, between Bootle and Crosby. Their final home was at 65 St Johns Road, one of a terrace of once elegant brick-built, three-storeyed houses. The ground floors of almost all these houses are now lock-up shops; No.65 is a haberdasher’s. It was some time before the Suggs’ first child arrived but in December 1895 Amy gave birth, in Southport, to a son whom they christened Frank Reginald. The son did not share his father’s interest in, and talent at, sports. No doubt this was some disappointment to Frank. But Frank Reginald had other talents. He was a fine singer (he once sang in the Royal Albert Hall with Queen Alexandra among the audience) and an accomplished pianist and 64 Marriage and Family 63 The 1911 census has the Sugg family living at this address.