Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

106 Before the War no more batting heroics: coming in last with six needed to win after a partnership of 44 between Kennedy and Jaques, he was out for a duck, caught at silly point by Hobbs off his first ball. It was the last game of his Hampshire career. Jack Hobbs refers to the dismissal in My Life Story : 56 Here is a story of a close finish that season between Surrey and Hampshire. H.K. [sic] Hesketh Prichard was last man in. He was one of those batsmen whose plan of campaign can be easily detected. Before the ball was bowled, he would decide how he would play it. If he intended to hit, he would shift his hands almost to the top of the bat handle. I watched him and drew to within three yards. He let the ball hit the bat and I fell on my knees, taking a catch almost off the end of the bat and Surrey had won by five runs. He told me afterwards that I had prevented him from sleeping a wink all that night. He played one more first-class match, turning out for MCC at Lord’s against Oxford University at the beginning of July. He took two for 57 and one for 39, this last dismissal being W.G.K.Boswell, later a Great War casualty, caught and bowled for eight. It was Lionel Tennyson’s first-class debut, and he scored 110 in the second innings. Remarkably enough, a long description of the match appeared in the Gleaner in Kingston, Jamaica. Hex distinguished himself by hitting a six over the members’ enclosure in the first innings. Almost straight after the game he was, on 7 July, chairing the committee of the Society of Authors again. By now these seem to have been fairly long meetings, held in London. The Society was effectively acting as a trade union for authors, offering support to their members involved in a variety of disputes – unpaid bills, plagiarism, breaches of copyright and especially piracy, with newspapers lifting serials from one another and not always paying for them. Hex played a good deal of club cricket this year. Parker instances I Zingari against Eton and Free Foresters against Harrow, but Hex certainly did not play for IZ against Eton this year. On July 17 and 18 he did play for IZ against Folkestone, taking seven wickets in Folkestone’s first innings 183 and a couple in their second of 295. IZ piled up 439 of which Teddy Wynyard made 113. Hex also played for IZ against Westminster School and the Household Brigade, the latter game accompanied by the band of the Scots Guards. In August he played in the cricket week at Howsham Hall, in Yorkshire – he had first played there in 1904. The home team was Major F.Raitt’s XI who first of all beat the Yorkshire Gentlemen; Raitt’s side scored 373, of which Teddy Wynyard made 157, and the Gentlemen made 138 and 122, with Hex taking two wickets in the first innings and five in the second. They then played the York Garrison: Raitt’s XI scored 223 (Wynyard 93, Hex 38*) and 263 for eight declared (Hex 33), and the military 188 and 167: Hex had six wickets in the first innings, two in the second. 56 Jack Hobbs, My Life Story, Hambledon Press, reprinted 1981.