Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

56 Chapter Four Runs Aplenty Over 300 cricketers have scored a century in their first innings in first- class cricket. Some have gone on to cricketing fame, and perhaps a bit of fortune too. But eight of them have a special distinction: after scoring a century in their debut innings, for one reason or another they never batted again at first-class level. Their final career averages, if they have one, are therefore superior to Don Bradman’s, but their names – still less their lives, in or out of cricket – are known to few. A century in only first-class innings N.F.Callaway 207 NSW v Queensland Sydney 1914/15 S.E.Wootton 105 Victoria v Tasmania Hobart 1923/24 H.H.E.Grangel 108 Victoria v Tasmania Melbourne 1935/36 M.N.Harbottle 156 Army v Oxford University Camberley 1938 S.Harding 100* Sinhalese v Burgher Colombo 1988/89 K.Seth 125* Madhya Pradesh v Vidarbha Indore 2000/01 J.S.D.Moffat 169 Cambridge Univ v Oxford Univ Oxford 2002 A.S.Sharma 185* Oxford Univ v Cambridge Univ Oxford 2010 The latest of the three instances in England – by a New Zealander, incidentally – is so recent that the player concerned may disqualify himself from the list in the future. 81 The other two British-based players have something else in common: both achieved greater fame in fields other than cricket. It is around these other fields that we must focus our explorations of their lives. Keeping the peace Michael Neale Harbottle is most renowned not for his day of cricketing glory, nor for his fine record in the Army, but for what he did after retiring from his Army career. It is on the strength above all of those later activities that he is the only cricketer in this book to have earned an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography , which encapsulates him as ‘army officer and peace campaigner’. It was the second of those facets that brought him a degree of fame, not to say notoriety, in the later part of his life. Born into a military family at Littlehampton on 7 February 1917, Harbottle was expected to follow his father into the Navy, but bunions meant that 81 Avinash Sharma has now returned to New Zealand. A doctor, his opportunities to play further first-class cricket may be limited.