Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

111 Gathering Storm second innings was 111 for one: a lot of action for one day’s cricket. IZ played two more games against Egypt, the last one a three-day affair which IZ won, but Hex took no part, and on 25 March wrote to say that he had been in bed for four days with his sciatica ‘but am now up’. He also says that ‘One after another the people in the Semiramis are being taken by typhoid, so you can imagine how worried I am about Lily.’ But ‘in four days [we] shall have left this accursed place. I wish we had never come here.’ ‘The others,’ he said, ‘drew the Egypt match’, the first of the two, but ‘they say I could have hurled the other side out with ease. A bowler’s wicket and no one to take advantage of it.’ He ends up describing it as ‘a sickening tour altogether’ and calls Egypt ‘a dirty, sweaty, fly-shot place’; then adds to Kate ‘But don’t say so. Say we enjoyed it all.’ Given the insalubrious places he had been, it is surprising he took so strongly against Egypt: but he was worried about Lily and typhoid. While in Egypt, according to one of Lily’s letters home, they met Professor and Mrs Flinders Petrie. Petrie, the father of Egyptian archaeology, had been digging in Egypt since 1880. He had time then to attend the annual Old Fettesian dinner on 17 April at Oddenino’s in Regent Street. After that he missed the April meeting of the Society of Authors, but was back in the chair in May: on 4 May it was agreed that Hex and the secretary should organise a deputation to the Foreign Office on the question of Russian copyright, a perpetual problem. It appeared that France and Germany had managed to come to an agreement and had signed copyright treaties with the Russians. After that he was regularly in attendance, at meetings on 25 May and 6 July. He was back in the chair again on 24 August, but of course by now war had been declared, though Parliament was not recalled until the following day, and by 5 October the committee was exercised by the question of publishers who were still making royalty payments on music scores written by Germans and whether this constituted trading with the enemy. (There is a hint there that buying the scores of and playing German music was not entirely patriotic.) Trading with the enemy was regarded as a common- law offence, but a bill to impose penalties for doing so was introduced in the Commons on 9 September. (Part of the reasoning for this was that the Common Law might take the view that this was treason, and life could get very complicated.). A committee of the House had already been set up to rule on particular cases. The prospect of the movies glimmered, but did not take off. Even though in May 1914 at the Picture Palace, Batley was that ‘very attractive picture’ The Cage , a fine historical drama written by Hex – it was originally one of the ‘grim prisons’ series of short stories. This was a study of life in the eighteenth century with many sword fights – even though another review says it was set in ‘feudal times’. The cast included Lilian Logan, Charles Rock, and Gerald Ames. The film seems to have had a wide distribution, since in July 1914 it turned up in New Zealand at Short’s Theatre in Willis Street, Wellington, where the advert was keen to mention Hex, even if it did refer to ‘Don O’ in a poor bit of proofing. A New Zealand critic