Lives in Cricket No 2 - Johnny Briggs

Briggs’ mournful widow, Alice, and their twin sons, John Hector and George, then aged eight, who had walked in the funeral procession, headed by the glass hearse heaped with flowers containing Briggs’ body, from their home in nearby Stamford Street. Three days earlier, Briggs had passed away quietly in his sleep – at 12 noon on 11 January, 1902 in Cheadle Royal Lunatic Asylum, according to his death certificate. The cause of death was given as ‘cerebral disease about two-and-a-half years – general paralysis of the insane’. The death was certified by the asylum’s deputy medical superintendent Walter Scowcroft, who had been in charge of Briggs’ welfare during his two stays in the hospital, and the certificate was also signed by the registrar, J.S.Dean. It was dated ‘Thirteenth January, 1902’, two days after Briggs’ death. Briggs had been in the asylum – now known as Cheadle Royal Hospital and run as a mental health care hospital by Affinity Healthcare – since the previous March. He had first been admitted there on 8 July, 1899, eight days after being taken ill with what was thought at the time to be an epileptic fit, on the evening of the first day’s play in the England v Australia Test at Headingley, where he had taken three wickets in the Australian innings to bring his tally against those opponents to 97. Briggs and some of his Test-playing colleagues were enjoying themselves at a Leeds music hall when Briggs was taken ill. Contemporary reports speculated about the cause of the illness. Some correspondents attributed it to the sheer nervousness with which he approached his recall to the England team, particularly as he was replacing Yorkshire’s Wilfred Rhodes on his home ground. Rhodes was, in fact, one of five players dropped by the newly- formed selection committee from the side that had lost the previous Test at Lord’s. There was a suggestion, supported in a subsequent interview by Hornby, that the sunstroke he had suffered in South Africa in 1889 was the cause of Briggs’ illness. Others put it down to an incident in a Lancashire v Surrey match at Old Trafford three weeks prior to the Headingley Test, when he had been struck a full-blooded blow under the heart by a shot from Surrey’s Tom Hayward. Briggs became one of the first patients to be X-rayed – probably by a device called a fluoroscope developed four years earlier by Thomas Edison – and this examination is believed to have shown The Last Rites 6