Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

distance for which the athlete is preparing Tea at five or six o’clock, bread and butter, lettuce or watercress, and a couple of new-laid eggs A quiet walk in the evening to “while away the time until bedtime” A good night’s sound sleep. Frank’s recommendations to youngsters for a healthy life, recommendations which there is every reason to believe he himself followed, would be enthusiastically endorsed by today’s life-style gurus: Don’t smoke Don’t drink Don’t chew Get all the sleep you can Get all the pure fresh air you can Eat plain wholesome food and plenty of it. The annual’s small format, the photographs and the low price, 3d (1.25 pence in decimal money), suggest that the Annual was aimed at a larger, and perhaps less erudite, audience than Wisden . There is no suggestion that the brothers contracted out production of the Annual. It has the hallmark of their own work, for example, in the cricket anecdotes feature, which draws on Frank’s fund of tales, and the references to matches in which he played in the sections on advice to young cricketers. The anecdotes were intended to entertain by adding colourful detail about players and incidents in matches that would escape the notice of a newspaper reporter in the pressbox, though anecdotes of unusual dismissals or interpretations of the Laws could be instructive as well as amusing. From the several pages of anecdotes (or ‘Odds and Ends’ as they were titled in some issues), I will restrict myself to this one (abbreviated) example from the 1897 issue: in a Derbyshire v Essex match, Walter Sugg was chasing a hit towards a long boundary. Earlier in the match he had damaged his arm. Seeing that the batsmen had already run four, and fearing that they could run one or two more with his weak throw-in, Walter kicked the ball over the boundary rope. The umpire signalled a boundary but the batsmen argued for four runs for the hit and four for overthrows. Frank adds that the umpires wrote to MCC for guidance should something similar occur in the future ‘but their answer did not transpire’. Away From Old Trafford 96