Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

91 to a further round of back-slapping from his team-mates, and a further smattering of applause from the assembled multitude. (Or however many people there were at Wantage Road at 5.30 pm on the second scheduled day of a non-Championship match.) Two days later Northants were back to the merry-go-round of the Championship, with a match against Yorkshire at – as it happened – the Town Ground at Kettering. Only the six most experienced members of the side that had beaten Dublin University were in the county side for this game; in fact, none of the three who had made their debuts against the University, and neither of the two players who had only played one or two first-class matches before that game, played again for Northamptonshire in 1925. But apart from Wooster and, as noted earlier, Norman Bowell, all had another chance for the county later. Indeed, opener W.C.Brown, who had made his first-class debut in the match against Dublin University, went on to play a further 126 first-class matches; and Edgar Towell, who had one match before the University game, played a further 68 matches. Both became regulars for the county from 1928. But not Wooster. His daughter, Anne Parkinson, has told me that her father was subsequently invited to play more regularly for the county but, probably under some parental pressure, decided that he could not afford to give up his position in the drawing office of a building firm in Kettering. So the Dublin University game remained his only first-class match; and the decision not to play again for the county has led to his unique position in the record-books today. It is good to be able to report that his feat did not go unremarked by the county club, who subsequently presented him with the hat-trick ball, suitably mounted and inscribed; it remains today a proud possession in the Parkinson household. Dick Wooster shared memorable moments off the cricket field as well as on it. Notably, he was in Normandy on the second day of the D-Day landings. He married Kate Anne (Kath) O’Rourke in Kettering in 1934, and they had a son, another Dick, as well as daughter Anne. His love of cricket remained throughout his life, and has been passed on to his son, grandsons, and a great-grandson. Perhaps one day another Wooster, or a Parkinson, will emerge on the first-class scene to take on the mantle of their distinguished forebear. Two points remain. First the status of ‘Wooster’s Match’: was it really a first-class fixture, given the relative weakness of both sides? The answer is, unequivocally, yes. Its recognition as a first-class match derives largely, it would seem, from the fact that Wisden treated it as such in 1926, as it did a handful of other matches between Dublin University and English counties in the 1920s. Mind you, that status wasn’t obvious from the outset: in The Cricketer the match score was given, without any report or bowling figures, not on the pages devoted to first-class inter-county matches, but in the section headed ‘Club Matches’, where it appears between the scorecards of Mitcham v Honor Oak, and Chiswick Park v Ealing. 155 155 The Cricketer , 8 August 1925, p 443. In the Wickets