Lives in Cricket No 25 - Tom Richardson

9 Family Background Tom was the fourth of seven children with three elder brothers and two younger sisters, the second one twinned with the youngest brother; his father had seven siblings, his mother four, so there was a plethora of aunts, uncles and cousins. There would not have been much money around on either side of the family and existence was probably not very much above the breadline. So, like many fast bowlers, the origins are firmly working class, at the base of the pyramid of Victorian society. In his childhood, the family moved from Byfleet to Mitcham where he spent his formative teenage years. All the family were present at 8 Hancock’s Cottages on Commonside East on Census Night in 1881 along with a lodger employed at the brickworks, but ten years later, the three elder brothers, Harry, Bill and Frank had left home (Frank was a groom with the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment in India), Tom, now described as a ‘Professional Cricketer’, was still living there, as was Charlie, now aged 16 and a butcher, and sister Ellen, aged 19, a domestic servant. Charlie’s twin sister, Alice, was not there, possibly in residential domestic service elsewhere. It was a common occupation for teenage girls at the time. Their mother died aged 54, in Croydon General Hospital in 1891, of diabetes, a growth in the bladder, haemorrhage and debility - a year before Tom made his Surrey début. He was with her at her death. Tom married Edith Emma Cheesman, in 1895. She was twenty-one at the time and the daughter of Charles Cheesman and Emma Hampton. Her father, who had died in 1887, was a leather dresser in 1871, a skinner Tom Richardson’s birth certificate – neither here nor on any other family certificates or censuses is there any reference to or inference of a gypsy caravan or Romany stock.