Lives in Cricket No 25 - Tom Richardson

11 Family Background in 1881; one of her elder brothers was a leather dresser, her mother a charwoman, her aunts, grandmother and great-grandmother laundresses. By 1891, Emma had moved out from her widowed mother’s home and was working as an assistant for her septuagenarian paternal grandfather at the Queen’s Head at Beddington Corner. Given Tom’s known propensity for a pint of ale (or more), it seems at least likely that this was where the couple met. On the occasion of the marriage in 1895, the Surrey Club presented Tom with £20 3 and the ball with which he had taken four wickets in an over. Ten years earlier, Mr and Mrs Walter Read had benefited by £250 and a clock. The difference epitomised the way in which Surrey and other counties treated their amateur and professional cricketers. The couple had three children, Kathleen, Tom and Edith, born at two-year intervals from 1898 to 1902, the first two (Edith was yet to be born) living with their parents in Thames Ditton in 1901. There was something of an extended family there as included in the Census return are Tom’s younger sister, Alice and Edith’s Aunt Hannah. Charles Alcock suggests that Richardson was born in Mitcham and that several generations of his ancestors hailed from there: Mitcham has in its time furnished many distinguished cricketers to the Surrey eleven. The latest is Richardson, whose forebears have been closely associated with the little village which gave the Humphreys and Jones among latter day players to County cricket. 4 As a professional journalist, Alcock was normally more meticulous about checking his sources, but this was in what today would be styled a coffee- table book where historical accuracy is sacrificed to presentation and pretty pictures. Facts, however, should not be allowed to spoil a good story and they have become clouded by a layer or two of mythology. Tom’s elder brother Bill, the second eldest, spent the remainder of his days in Mitcham, plying his trade as a boot-maker and dying there in 1948. A few years before that he was profiled in the local newspaper: Bill Richardson is old Mitcham in everything but birth. He is a Cockney according to the Registers and if Finsbury 5 is within the sound of Bow Bells. His father was a horse doctor 6 (the old fashioned substitute for a ‘vet’) in Ropemaker Street in the City and came to Mitcham when Bill was ten to manage a branch business for his employers in Lewis Road. Tom Richardson, four years younger than Bill was born in Byfleet so it will be seen that the Richardson family was not static at that time. “All we Richardsons learnt our cricket on Mitcham Green and we began young. Tom was a genius at the game from the start. He was soon spotted by Tom Harvey and other big fry and yanked off to play with 3 Surrey CCC minutes 17 October 1895 4 Famous Cricketers and Cricket Grounds 5 An error repeated in his obituary: censuses say ‘Dorking’. Charles was born in Finsbury. 6 Maybe an exaggeration. Censuses say ‘Carman’, ‘Coachman’ and ‘Coal dealer’.