Lives in Cricket No 21 - Walter Read

14 Family Background 12 Surrey Mirror: W W Read’s Obituary 11 January 1907 début, but he never played first-class cricket and ironically it was very shortly after the year of the putative launch of his professional cricket career that Walter senior came to the end of his innings. There were three servants on the 1891 Census, only one in 1901, so there was some downsizing, occasioned partly perhaps by financial restraint and a lower income than he had enjoyed with Surrey, and partly by reduced demand, as the family progressed from infancy to adolescence. Robert Read, already a widower at the time of Walter’s wedding, gave up his stake in Holmesdale School in the same year. It had become known first as the Holmesdale Academy, then as University School, was taken over by his colleague, Christopher Search, and demolished in the early twentieth century. 12 The following advertisement appeared regularly in the local press in the mid-1880s Holmesdale Academy, Reigate Established 1855. Principals: Messrs Read and Search Superior Commercial Education Good French, Shorthand etc WW’s son Walter, later known as Eric, was the second of three husbands of Rita Harrison, and his son Michael, WW’s grandson, has inherited the sporting genes, albeit in another area, achieving international distinction in long distance swimming. Before turning to distance swimming, he was in the British Olympic team in Rome in 1960, then for most of the period 1979 to 2011, he was ‘King of the Channel’, the title awarded to the man who has swum that 20-odd mile stretch of water the most times, as verified by the Channel Swimming Association. At the last count he had completed 33 successful swims and achieved a number of other distinctions, including being the first person to complete a three and a four way swim of Lake Windermere, the first person to swim some of the Scottish Lochs including Loch Tay and a two way Wash swim from Hunstanton to Skegness and back. He has also become an accomplished Open Water Masters swimmer winning a number of National titles. At Fort Lauderdale on 30 November 2010 the International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF) announced the names of the