Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

62 He did not play in the Army’s only first-class match of 1939, at Cambridge early in June – which proved to be the Army’s last-ever first-class fixture as an independent team. Neither did he play for Dorset in that year. Their season started little more than a month before the declaration of war, when no doubt there were more pressing matters for 2nd Lt Harbottle to attend to. He did however play in the Army’s one-day game against the West Indians at Lord’s in May, when he was bowled for a duck. He was also in the side that started a rain-ruined match against the Navy at Aldershot in July, in which the Army did not get to start their innings. Then it was off to war, and there is no further record of him playing cricket for 12 years. When the war ended he was named in an article in The Cricketer as a player for the future of Army cricket: ‘he might yet fill the gap which will be felt when Godfrey Bryan retires from Army cricket,’ 95 but whether because of his hand injury, or because military duties took priority, or because his place was indeed blocked by Bryan (who played his last senior match for the Army in 1951), Harbottle did not resume a place in their side until 1952. In the previous year he had reappeared for Dorset for the first time since 1938, making his only century in Minor Counties cricket in the second innings of his first match – 105 out of 147 against Oxfordshire at Oxford, reaching his century in 2½ hours. According to the Oxford Mail he ‘used all the left-hander’s strokes, his timing on the off side being as near perfection as one could wish’. In the same year he also made 84 and 77 against Berkshire at Reading, and averaged over 50 for the season for the only time in his Minor Counties career. Wisden in 1952 commented that ‘with [his] return after many years’ absence, the [Dorset] batting was considerably strengthened’. He was to play regularly for Dorset in 1952 and 1953, approaching another century in the latter year when he made 98 against Wiltshire at Swindon. He made one final appearance for the county in 1956, ending his career for them by being run out, just as he had been in his first innings for the county. 96 By now his appearances for the Army were also less frequent, as the side became dominated by National Servicemen who had already begun to make their mark in the first-class county game. Three matches in 1952 were followed by another lengthy intermission, before in 1958 and 1959 Harbottle, now in his forties, returned to the side as captain. For the Army he could not recapture his pre-war form, his best innings for them after his return in 1952 being a score of 42 against a strong Hampshire side, whose main bowlers were Butch White, Vic Cannings and Mervyn Burden, on the County Ground at Southampton in July 1958. And so, after a final game against the RAF in August 1959, Lt-Col Harbottle left the active cricketing scene. Other life-defining activities were now to take over. 95 E.H.Fitzherbert, The Regular Army and First-Class Cricket, in The Cricketer 1945, p 178. 96 These were the only two run-out dismissals of his 42-innings Minor Counties’ career. Runs Aplenty