Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

21 about three years since’. It was on one of his visits to London, on Friday, 7 June 1929, that Emile McMaster died suddenly at the Whitehall Hotel 30 in Guilford Street, Bloomsbury, 31 the cause of his death being recorded rather graphically as ‘heart failure; exhaustion; duodenal ulcer; suppression of urine’. He was 68 years old, and died less than a week after his erstwhile competitor for a place in the ‘England’ cricket team, Charles Coventry, who was his junior by six years. Emile McMaster was buried in Highgate Cemetery on 11 June 1929. His grave today bears no inscription and is hard to find, its southern end being obscured by a box tree, and the adjacent grave having ridden over it on its western side. A sad and anonymous end for, in cricketing terms, an almost anonymous player. Legacy Before finally passing on to an assessment of McMaster’s worthiness as a Test cricketer, a word is called for about the not inconsiderable sporting legacy he left to his three sons. The oldest, Patrick, sometimes called Pieter, was a military man who ended his career with the rank of Major. He received the OBE for his military services during the First World War and was ‘a Kenya settler of distinctive personality with an unusual talent for games and sports’. According to his obituary in The Times , 32 he played representative cricket in Kenya as well as being a good golfer and shot, and an outstanding angler. He was described as ‘a really great judge of cricket’ who had been watching a match from the pavilion at Lord’s on the afternoon of his death. 33 This obituary also includes the intriguing statement that Patrick played cricket as a fast bowler for Hampshire before the First World War. Unfortunately I can find no corroboration for this. He certainly did not play for Hampshire at first-class level, and his name does not appear in the few Club and Ground scorecards that found their way into the local press during the years leading up to the war. Emile’s twin sons, Humphrey and Michael, both went into the Royal Navy and both reached the rank of Lt-Commander. Both were outstanding golfers in South Africa and in Britain, Humphrey playing in the British Amateur Championships in both 1928 and 1929. Michael also excelled at squash, winning the South African Amateur Championships in 1926 and 1927, and reaching the last eight of the British Amateur Championship in 1929. After leaving the Navy, both became directors of the sports equipment 30 In 2011, the Whitehall Hotel was a youth hostel going by the name of ‘Smart Russell Square’; it appeared to be in good external repair, but inside it looked run-down and well past any glory days it may have experienced in the 1920s. 31 The coincidence of his life beginning and ending at Gilford/Guilford has not escaped me, but does not seem worthy of comment beyond this note. 32 On 1 June 1962. This obituary is the source of much of the material, and all of the quotations, in this paragraph. 33 It is tempting to think that this may also have been true of his father. There was certainly a match on at Lord’s on the day of Emile’s death, and we already know of his custom of watching cricket during his visits to the capital; but on this we can only speculate. The Unlikeliest Test Cricketer