Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

122 The Legacy sniping and defending against sniping. He was eventually decorated and his lessons learned. They may well still apply, though happily trench- warfare is a thing of the past. Surprisingly in the circumstances the Imperial War Museum has nothing about him at all. More crucially for Hex as a cricketer, just how good a bowler was he? The 1905 Gentlemen’s team at Lord’s had Hex bowling first-change after Walter Brearley and Stanley Jackson, with Jessop and Bosanquet to follow. In Cardus’s chapter on ‘Some Fast Bowlers’ in Close of Play, written in 1955, 63 he says ‘Fast bowling was indeed so fashionable four or five decades ago that amateur cricketers revelled and excelled in it.’ Then Hesketh-Prichard of Hampshire ‘appealed to a boy’s imagination by combining cricket in the summer with authorship in the winter. To have written The Adventures of Don Q and also to have bowled fast for the Gentlemen at Lord’s surely fulfilled and crowned any man’s life.’ The official Hampshire history says of him that in 1905: ‘Hesketh- Prichard’s pace and hostility was often formidable’, before regretting that he did not play more. We have two first-hand descriptions of his bowling, one published during his career and one by way of obituary. The first appeared in Fry and Beldam’s Great Bowlers and Fielders , published in 1907, though the photographs were taken a year or two earlier. Fry had first-hand experience of Hex, who had cleaned bowled him for 18, not a common experience for Fry, at Southampton in 1902, when Hex took six for 39 and bowled Sussex out for 72. Hesketh Prichard, said Fry, is: An example of a fast bowler with the action and delivery of a medium- paced bowler. The speed in excess of that which usually results from this kind of action is due to extra length of limb and consequent increase of leverage, combined with an artificial acceleration of swing. Bowlers with this kind of delivery generally prefer to use a medium or medium-fast ball as their main attack, and to keep the fast ball of which they are capable in reserve as a variation. Hesketh Prichard, however, prefers to make his fastest ball the foundation of his method. As he is very tall, his actual pace is considerably enhanced by the height from which the ball is delivered. He can bowl a length which is not short and yet make the ball rise to a difficult height by the time it comes within the batsman’s reach. He requires a good wicket-keeper and good slips to ensure his full shares of success. Even on fiery or crumbling wickets he depends more upon accurate length and the rise of the ball than upon action-break; but on sticky wickets, when he reduces the pace of his bowling, he commands a good finger-break from the off. It is a curious fact about his bowling that every now and then he has a day when, from no assignable cause, he can make the ball swing from leg after pitching. This is something less than a leg-break and something more than mere ‘going with the arm’. 63 Neville Cardus, Close of Play, Sportsmans’ Book Club, 1956, p.99.