Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

24 Chapter Two Of the Late Frederick J.Hyland, again An awful lot of cricketers have played only a single first-class match. As at mid-2011, as many as 90 have done so without either batting or bowling. 34 What marks Frederick James Hyland out from the other 89 is firstly, the extreme shortness, 12 balls, of the match that constituted his entire first- class career and secondly, the fact that 43 years later his brief moment in the spotlight was the subject of a light and wistful essay in Ronald Mason’s delightful book Sing All A Green Willow . 35 By that time, Hyland’s life was over. Indeed, what prompted Mason’s essay, which he entitled simply ‘Of the Late Frederick J.Hyland’, was the appearance of his four-line obituary in Wisden 1965, with its reference to the extreme brevity of his first-class career. Mason’s thesis was ‘by whatever curious mistake of fortune … the distinction that he can wave in the teeth of all competitors is an indisputable and proud one. He had played first-class cricket; and what kind of proportion of genuine cricket- lovers can say the same?’ Mason did not seek to explore the facts behind Hyland’s brief career, or the story of the man himself, commenting: ‘for the purposes of these meditations I do not need to know [these details]; he remains for me an epitome of the life of man as illuminated long ago by the Venerable Bede, the sparrow flying into the banquet-hall, fluttering for a moment in the light and heat, and then flying forth at the far door into wintry darkness’. And of course he was right: none of these details really matters. But Hyland’s sheer obscurity has fascinated me for some time. How come this Sussex man played for Hampshire? Did he have any cricketing pedigree at all? Or was he perhaps spotted wandering round the ground at Wantage Road one rainy day in June 1924 and invited, regardless of any cricketing ability, or any county qualification, to make up the numbers in a depleted Hampshire side? To my mind, more prosaic than Ronald Mason’s, these questions needed answering. And when I found that Hyland shared a birth-date (same date, different year) with Jack Hobbs, another thought arose. Was he, by contrast with The Master, a great unfulfilled talent who, but for the appalling weather of June 1924, might have embarked on a long and distinguished first-class career? 34 Thirty of the 90 at least participated in the game by keeping wicket; all but five of these 30 got their names on the scorecard by recording a dismissal. (One of the five non-dismissers was Bob Richards, qv). Of the other 60, 14 took at least one catch, but the remaining 46 appear on the scorecard solely as ‘did not bat’. 35 Ronald Mason, Sing All A Green Willow , Epworth Press, 1967.