Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

92 Even today, and despite the ACS’s inclusion of it in its first-class match- list, there are some who are less sure about the game’s status. I have correspondence dated October 2010 from the Northamptonshire CCC archivist in which he writes that Wooster’s match ‘was not deemed as [a] first-class game … [Wooster] did take a hat-trick, but of course this was not recognised.’ Well, as we have seen, it was recognised by the county club at the time, and the game has been fully accepted as a first-class match for many years. But it is true that his hat-trick took some time to find its way into the record books: it is not included in the list of hat-tricks in the first edition of Roy Webber’s Playfair Book of Cricket Records in 1951, though it made it into the next edition of that book, in 1961, with the bowler unfortunately mis-identified as G.Wooster, but we’ll let that pass. 156 And finally, Wodehousians will spot the resonance of Dick Wooster’s name, and may wonder. It is well known that Bertie Wooster’s gentleman’s gentleman Jeeves was named after the pre-First World War Warwickshire cricketer Percy Jeeves. In 1971, late in his writing career, cricket-lover P.G.Wodehouse revealed that ‘his’ Jeeves’s first name was Reginald: the same as the given name of our Dick Wooster. Could it be that he chose this Christian name as an allusion to the Northamptonshire cricketer, whose name somehow stuck with Wodehouse for over 45 years after the day that secured his fame? It would be lovely to think so, but I fear the answer is no. Wodehouse’s first writings about a Bertie Wooster-like character appeared in some short stories written before the First World War; the character concerned was named Reginald Pepper. If Wodehouse’s decision to christen ‘his’ Jeeves as Reginald was made with any backward glance – and there is no reason to assume that it was – then Reggie Pepper is surely more likely to have been the inspiration, rather than our Reginald Wooster. But you never know … 156 His name was not finally corrected in the major record books until the second edition of the Wisden Book of Cricket Records in 1986. In the Wickets