Lives in Cricket No 19 - Frank Sugg

The annual was printed by a local jobbing printer and was distributed through newsagents and railway kiosks as well as by post (when the cost was 3½d). Whether, after paying royalties, licence fees for including the laws of the game and the first-class averages, and fees to guest contributors, for example, the Annual made a trading profit cannot be established but, even if it did not, the advertising medium that the annual provided and the publicity it generated among the cricket-following public must have been a justification for its publication. However, competition from the increasingly diverse print media finally overwhelmed the Annua l and it ceased publication after the 1905 edition. Although it has now been largely forgotten, today’s cricket followers will find the Frank Sugg Pocket Cricket Annual an interesting and nostalgic read. The brothers also published a companion football annual with a similar purpose and a similar format and style. These annuals provided Frank with valuable commercial experience which was useful for his sports business, and developed his writing and editing expertise which he was able to make use of some years later when he tried his hand at journalism for the local paper in Liverpool. There are other examples of Frank Sugg’s mission to increase interest and participation in sport. He was a vice-president of the Leeds League, founded in 1928 and later the West Yorkshire Association Football League, with the aim of bringing all open-age teams in the Leeds area under one organisation. 95 Frank had no obvious connections with football in Leeds, but his name counted for enough for the League to want him in this honorary position. More interestingly, Frank gave his support to the effort in the 1920s to establish a Ladies’ Football Association with the object of promoting football as a game that could be enjoyed by women as well as by men. The Football Association strongly opposed the campaign. Frank had no time for those who argued that playing football would be damaging to a girl’s health and femininity. Throughout his life, and in his publications, he propagated the view that sport and exercise were as essential to a healthy life for girls and women as they were for boys and men. Lancashire was one of the strongholds of women’s football and Frank did what he could at the local level to improve the standard of the women’s Away From Old Trafford 97 95 See www.Kirklees.gov.uk/community/localorgs