Lives in Cricket No 21 - Walter Read

77 up the water spout – for carrying off the rain – attached to a house outside and opposite the ground; the said ball being afterwards fielded out of the spout with the help of a ladder, by a man who threw it back again into the ground, amid tumultuous applause. 135 Six years later, in his Annals of Cricket , Read relates the same incident in almost exactly the same terms, with only minor changes to vocabulary and punctuation. 136 This year too he played his part in entertaining the crowds. The South beat the North by the narrow margin of nine runs, the contribution of the Surrey contingent, Read in particular being significant. Though the South had a very useful majority of 58 runs to help them in their second innings, the majority of the batsmen found the light late on Friday afternoon very troublesome and but for the Surrey men who had done the bulk of the run- getting on the previous day they would have fared very badly. As it was Mr Read, Lohmann and Abel between them were responsible for 91 out of 115 from the bat, and Mr Read’s share was nearly one half of the entire total. His play was worthy of unstinted praise.…. as will be seen he scored altogether in the match 146 for once out. On Friday, too, his play was absolutely without fault, and his brilliant performance will be a source of satisfaction to all classes of cricketers. 137 A not dissimilar eulogy was included in the Sporting Life , the ‘Man on the Spot’ producing the following lines: TO MR WALTER READ See him make his boundary cuts, He ain’t the sort to play for nuts: Hooks ’em here and carves 'em there, Bungs ’em off and hits 'em square: And when I shed my little bob, I like to see him “on the job”. 138 The rhyming couplets would not be a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, but the sentiment is clear enough. 135 Cricket 11 September 1890 136 p 184 137 Cricket 18 September 1890 138 Sporting Life p 182 Surrey and England 1888/97