Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

7 Chapter One The Unlikeliest Test Cricketer Surely this can’t be right – a cricketer who made his only first-class appearance in a Test match for England, was dismissed first ball, and didn’t bowl, keep wicket, or take a catch in the field? The stuff of bad fiction, surely? But it is true; the cricketer was J.E.P.McMaster, and he’s there in all the standard reference books. So just who was this man, and what was he doing playing in a Test match? Let’s first agree on his name. In full it was Joseph Emile Patrick McMaster , and more than one reputable source – including, at the time of writing, ESPNcricinfo – has assumed that he was known as Joseph, or even Joe. But to call him Joe is akin to referring to two post-war England captains as Mike Cowdrey and Johnny Brearley: not only is the abbreviation out of place, but the name is in any case wrong. Joseph was indeed McMaster’s first given name, but throughout his life he called himself, and was known as, Emile McMaster. 1 And it is as Emile that we will know him here. So little about his life has been researched and published that not all that long ago it was possible for Joanne Watson to write this in her book Moments of Glory : Joe McMaster [hmm] made his only first-class appearance in a Test … How he ever came to be included, with no apparent cricketing pedigree, isn’t known. He may have been called upon just to make up the numbers’. 2 It’s time to make good this ignorance, and in so doing to answer the question: was Emile McMaster the most unlikely, and least qualified, Test cricketer of them all? Ulster, Harrow and Cambridge Emile McMaster was an Irishman. The son of a wealthy Ulster linen-mill owner, he was born in the town of Gilford in County Down, around 25 miles south-west of Belfast, on Saturday, 16 March 1861. The Gilford Mill was one of the largest in Ireland. At its peak in the 1860s it employed 1,500 people; and it made the McMaster family comfortably rich. 1 His death was registered, by one of his sons, in the name of ‘Emile Joseph Patrick McMaster’, and this same ordering of his names was given on some other occasions too. No birth certificate for McMaster has been traced - civil registration of births in Ireland was not required until 1864 - but the order ‘Joseph Emile Patrick’ is found in all the earliest available documents, such as on the Harrow School register, and in the 1881 census return, and there can be little doubt that this is the correct, formal, ordering of his forenames. 2 Joanne Watson, Moments of Glory, Lennard Publishing, 1990.