Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

117 War and its Aftermath though once, one lovely summer evening, we adjourned for dinner at the end of our opponents’ second innings having fifty runs to get to win. When we came out to get the fifty it was so dark that we only pulled it off by one wicket.’ It is an odd image from the Western Front. He was involved around this time, too, in teaching a Portuguese battalion, which resulted in his later being appointed as a Commander of the Order of Avis, a Portuguese chivalric order. In 1910, when the Portuguese monarchy ended, the Republic of Portugal had abolished most of the chivalric orders. However, in 1917, at the end of the Great War, some of these were re-established as civilian orders of merit to reward outstanding services to the state, the office of grand master belonging to the head of state – the president of the Republic. But by September he was far from well, on and off. He was back and forth on sick leave, but by March 1918 was hospitalised with an abscess and ‘rather miserable’. He got home in April, but was never really well again. Conan Doyle wrote in April trying to cheer him up by suggesting that his problems were basically nervous in origin, while admitting that his own doctoring skills were rather rusty. * * * * * * * After the war and despite his illness, Hex was still writing and, when he could, still shooting, though most of it was at Gorhambury. Michael, his eldest, was at this time sent to stay with his grandparents at Gorhambury, though he was also away at Fettes. In 1919 Hex wrote a piece for the Cornhill Magazine entitled His Last Caribou , which was written in memory of ‘Alfgar’, Alfred Gathorne-Hardy, who was killed at the battle of Loos leading his battalion over the top. The piece remembers Alfgar shooting a huge caribou stag in Newfoundland. Hex wrote about his wartime experiences in Sniping in France , which was to become his best-known book in later years: it was first published in 1920 and reprinted as recently as 1994. It is both a reminiscence of the war and a handbook for sniping, explaining the problems he had in persuading the War Office to accept it and that it had to be done properly. But he seemed to have suffered something of a personality change, perhaps because he could no longer do the things he used to. Parker says: even as he talked, there was a difference. His eagerness became feverish, his crowded memories, the things he had seen and the things he would not talk about, seemed to me too much for him – he had borne too much. There were things, I knew, about which he did not want to talk; I wondered whether there were things of which he tried not to think. In July 1919 he had been re-elected to the chair of the Society of Authors, which he had relinquished during the war, but on 27 January 1920 The Times reported that he had relinquished the chair of what was now the Society of Authors, Playwrights and Composers, though he stayed on the committee.