Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

49 year. Lily was the initial force behind PGH’s passion for the game, and remained his most loyal supporter and concerned critic; but it was Uncles Sidney and Percy who instructed him in the basics: It was all thanks to my grandfather, Joseph Herbert … and to my two uncles that I learned to love the game. Whenever I could persuade them to do so we used to play in the [narrow] back garden of ‘Melrose’ with a tennis ball and a tree stump as a wicket. They batted first with a very old bat but, as I was too young for that, I had to use a tennis racquet and ‘first bounce’ or ‘over the wall’ was out. Of course, whenever we broke a window, as sometimes happened, ‘the old man’ used to get in a temper and that was the end of the game for that day. With a tennis ball and a tennis racquet for me, and first bounce out, and two agile young men fielding at silly point and silly mid-on, I soon learned to hit the ball where there was no fielder, and that instinct stood me in very good stead all through my cricket life. 75 The once ‘agile young’ Percy Herbert was still playing in a good class of club cricket in Hove at least until his late forties. Of his life outside cricket, I regret that I have been able to discover little. The 1911 census records him employed as a ‘medical and electrical masseur’, whatever that might have involved; but how he earned his crusts in later life, if indeed he had to earn a crust at all – the family was not badly off – I do not know. Late in 1919 he married Dora Breach at Steyning, near Brighton. There were several players called Breach in the Steyning cricket team before the war, and it seems fair to assume that he met his wife through cricket. The marriage, which was childless, lasted 27 years until Dora’s death in October 1946, and Percy lived on as a widower for another 11 years. A Hove resident virtually all his life, he died there on 24 January 1958 at the age of 79, and was laid to rest with his wife in Hove Cemetery. 75 From a reminiscence by P.G.H.Fender in the booklet Brighton Brunswick Club: Centenary Year 1870-1970 . In Streeton’s version of the same story, the ball had become a soft rubber ball: you pays your money … . Never Seen The tomb of the unseen cricketer. Percy Herbert’s grave in Hove Cemetery, photographed in 2010.