Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

114 War and its Aftermath was that sportsmanship and effective warfare did not go together. Hex saw the effects of gas, and could not bear to write about it, but on 25 May he wrote ‘I shall get down to shoot at Germans in this job all right.’ Sometimes there was relaxation. On 10 June he wrote home asking for cricket balls. ‘Yesterday,’ he said, ‘we played ‘retire at twenty’, apparently retiring twice when he had scored 25. He was silent about the effect his bowling had! In a letter of 25 June he wrote: I had a great cricket match with Palmer. 58 He was backed against me under the following rules, as he is a baseball player: 1 Prichard to bowl at a single walking-stick as thick as a cane 2 Pitch nineteen yards long. Tennis ball to be used and a broomstick 3 FP to throw at an ordinary wicket 4 Prichard to be out if caught first bounce. Palmer to be out if caught or bowled, but not out first bounce. Palmer scored nine, bowled by Hex. Hex then scored 53 retired, had Palmer caught at the wicket for none, let him have another go and then bowled him for none. Then Palmer and Prichard played ‘the rest’ and won by one wicket. He adds, to Lily: ‘none of them bowl as well as you do’. Clearly even in these surroundings, Hex was going to be competitive! An example crops up here of his real ability to get on with unexpected people. He encountered Henry Tomlinson of the Daily News , who was a socialist and inclined to disapprove of the war, but Hex calls him ‘a good sort’. Before the war Tomlinson had specialised in travel writing and had sailed 2,000 miles up the Amazon and his The Sea and the Jungle , published in 1912, is still regarded as a classic of travel writing, so they 58 A baseball player for the Cincinatti Reds. Military mode. Hex was decorated twice for gallantry.