Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

115 War and its Aftermath had more than a little in common. Tomlinson wrote, and wrote well, about the war: 59 he wrote of Hex that he displayed ‘thought and artful strategy which would have distinguished Sherlock Holmes’. But increasingly Hex was turning his mind to the problem of sniping and being sniped at. When he came home in July he and Alfred Gathorne- Hardy, having crawled out and liberated steel plates from the German trenches, carried out tests on English and German steel plates, finding that the German rifles penetrated the English plates, but not vice versa unless heavier rifles were used. In August he was writing to Lily asking her to beg and borrow telescopic sights wherever she could find them. All of this was simply being done by Hex on his own initiative with absolutely no support. Finally on 1 September, after Hex had buttonholed a fine selection of generals, it seemed to have been agreed that he would be attached to an army corps in charge of sniping. He could start in three weeks. But there was still time for some sort of cricket. On 6 September ‘we’ played ‘the 1st Scots Guards and beat them 72 to 14 and in the second match (five of us and eight of them) by two wickets.’ Hex got ten wickets and 52 for once out. One of his correspondents here was Theodore Roosevelt, who was drumming up telescopic sights for him in the neutral United States. He had met Roosevelt in 1910, and the ex-President, as we have seen, was an admirer of his exploration and shooting. But Roosevelt was a different kind of big-game hunter from Hex: he was very much into the slaughter of large numbers of animals. On safari in Africa in 1910 Roosevelt and his son Kermit shot 512 animals. Mass slaughter was not Hex’s style, as he seems to have preferred the stalking – the pitting of wits against the animal – to the actual kill. On 3 October he is writing home about the death in action of Alfred Gathorne-Hardy, which he had only heard about in a letter from home. He said little about it, but it must have affected him deeply. ‘Alfgar’ they knew him as, and Alfgar was to be the name by which Hex’s younger son Alfred, born in 1916, was to be known. (This Alfgar was to disappear while working with the partisans in Yugoslavia in the Second World War.). Alfgar the Dane was a novel of 1895 by Rev A.D.Crake. Crake wrote romping historical fiction, but also a History of the Church under the Roman Empire and was the author of the Anglican Missal. In November Hex is ‘shooting very well’ and hit a matchbox three times in succession at 300 yards, and adds ‘and yet I know I am not a good shot’. A piece of slightly false modesty there, it seems. By this time suddenly he is the flavour of the month, and in demand everywhere, being asked for by divisions all along the front. It was decided that he would become a General Staff Officer in charge of sniping for the Third Army. But GHQ had rules about this sort of thing, and they said that he would have to relinquish staff pay and accept the 59 See http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/hmt/w4d.html