Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

107 Before the War Then it was back to the stage. Fred Terry turned up again. Was it time for Don Q to make his stage debut? It was now in rehearsal, and Terry wrote to Hex to say that his presence in London was ‘essential’. But for the moment it all ended in tears, and for this he had missed Lord and Lady Shaftesbury’s cricket week at Cranborne. The rest of the summer and autumn was for shooting, stalking and fishing. Parker here provides the story, from Hex’s game book: Raeshaw for the Twelfth; two days at Langholm; with Lord and Lady Graham in Arra, where on one day ‘various’ made up the bag to seventeen species; with Reginald Smith at Cortachy; to the Holts at Clashnadarroch, Gartly, and on from there to Lord Leith at Fyvie Castle; from Fyvie to Skye, where Lord Knutsford rented a deer forest south of the Cuhullins; and from Skye to Lord Ellesmere at Mackerton on the Tweed; from the Tweed to the Duke and Duchess of Montrose at Buchanan Castle; west again to Arran, to see the battle practice of the Fleet at Lamlash, the guest of Captain Fisher on board the St Vincent, and Elizabeth stayed at a hotel on shore; and finally to Sir Richard and Lady Graham at Netherby, with its wonderful duck-shooting. As a rich slice of Edwardian upper-class life it could hardly be bettered. He was also busy with the Society of Authors, chairing meetings on 3 November and 1 December, and on 29 November at a general meeting they had Lord Roberts as a guest. Lord Roberts banged on about the Territorials and the need to be prepared for war. At the December meeting they had agreed to support the Authors’ League in the United States, including with money, in a case involving Jack London. And it was a heavy year for writing: the Grim Prisons series running in Pearson’s in the UK, with titles like On the Citadel of the Black, The Cage, Bottle-shaped Dungeon of Don Otto, Prisoners of Fan Beard, In the Cell of the Hacho, Prison of Watching Eyes and Twenty-first Prison of Don Sebastian. The Cage was shortly to become a motion picture, though not, as the books say, a major one. There is a deal of correspondence this year with the New York branch of his agents Curtis Brown. In November 1913 Curtis Brown were in correspondence with the United States edition of Pearson’s about a new series of Don Q stories, which, they said, would cost a bit more than the last series which was £17 10s 0d, a bit less than $85, a time. This also shows just how far the stories were spreading. In August 1913 Curtis Brown sent Hex 6s 9d to ‘finish off’ the royalties on Hodder and Stoughton’s Sixpenny Edition of Tammer’s Duel . They said they were looking the matter up to see ‘if it can’t be either reprinted or resold and yet more pence squeezed out of it.’ The Times reported on a shooting party in Hertfordshire in October at which ‘excellent sport was obtained’. Hex was one of a party organised by Mr Otto Beit: Otto Beit was a German-born financier and philanthropist who had been heavily involved in gold mining in Rhodesia and had helped to finance the Jameson Raid. The other guests included Apsley