Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

125 The Legacy house matches) and goes on to his 36 against Surrey in 1912 as an example. But his first-class batting average was 7.46 and his highest score 37. Is he remembered? There are the books. In 1971 there was a proposal to make a programme about him for Radio 4, where November Joe had run in Story Time the previous year, but it seems to have come to nothing. Jeremy Malies wrote about him in his book in 2000, perhaps trying to emphasise eccentricity. There have been re-creations of his Patagonian and Labrador journeys (though with family connections) and there are even still those who believe the giant sloth will one day lumber forth from its cave. They tend to call themselves cryptozoologists. If you look on line you can get this : Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard: Distinguished Service Order, Military Cross, Royal Geographical Society, Zoological Society of London, Big-Game Hunter, Marksman, Sniper . But it is simply a collation of Wikipedia articles: at the time of writing it had not sold a single copy on Amazon. And then there was Don Q. It was through Don Q that Kate and Hex were best known. Parker says of Don Q that ‘he took his seat side by side with Captain Kettle and Sherlock Holmes’ … which shows how fame passes, because it is fair to say that while we know of Holmes, C.J.Cutcliffe Hyne and his creation have disappeared as far as most of us are concerned, even though the last Captain Kettle book was published as recently as 1938. Historically there is nothing so dead as a previous generation’s popular fiction, and, writing as recently as 2000, Jeremy Malies suggested that Hex’s fiction was ‘long gone’. The internet has changed that: all three Don Q titles are available in new print-on-demand editions, as are Karadac , A Modern Mercenary , and November Joe . Some also come free as e-books. Until the 1870 Education Act, which provided the beginnings of state education for all, at least half the population of England would have been functionally illiterate and certainly unable to read a book. So although there was a market for popular fiction before then, it was limited largely to ‘penny dreadfuls’ with pictures and not too much text. If you could read well, you probably read the classics. But popular fiction emerged in the nineteenth century, with Sir Walter Scott probably the best example who is still read today. The difference between literary and popular fiction at the time was probably whether a particular work lent itself to serialisation, either in newspapers or in the wide selection of magazines running a selection of stories, some of them in serial form, and other articles. Dickens, Conrad and Thackeray were serialised: George Eliot was not. Even so, the first editions tended to be quite expensive, perhaps 8s 0d or so. The later cheap reprints were more likely to be sixpence or a shilling, suitable for railway reading. Hex’s writing career had begun with the sale of the original short version of Tammer’s Duel under the name of E. and H.Heron: the original version