Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

129 manager, F.J.Nettlefold, who was probably best-known for having played Othello in full medieval armour in 1919. He went on to a career as a film producer. Parker says ‘the part was taken by the actor-manager who put on the play, and the part did not suit him’ adding that ‘it was Don Q with the silent and saturnine brigand left out.’ From then on the character and the books faded away: there were no new editions of Don Q , though several of the other books were reprinted from time to time. The first of Johnston McCulley’s Zorro stories appeared in 1919: McCulley was a prolific writer and Zorro appeared in magazine serials, in book form and crucially on film. In the 1940s The Adventures of Don Q and The Daughter of Don Q were running as Saturday-morning serials in New York cinemas. This was presumably using the Douglas Fairbanks character, and probably owed something to the fact that Zorro would still have been protected by copyright. Beyond that Hex seems to leave one more literary legacy. He is sometimes said to have been the model for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay or, as suggested by John Sutherland in the Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction , for Hornung’s A.J.Raffles. But there seems to be little evidence for either of these suggestions and Raffles was of course a devious spin bowler rather than an honest paceman. In any case the first Raffles story was published in 1898 and it is unlikely that Hornung would have known Hex by then, certainly not as a cricketer. If one were to look for Hex’s influence in Buchan it might be better to look at John MacNab, where the stalking scenes might well reflect Buchan’s conversations with Hex. But there is one character about whom there can be little doubt, and that is Lord John Roxton in Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. The book is based on Hex’s descriptions of Patagonia, and Roxton is very tall, an explorer with The Legacy Douglas Fairbanks sen, as Don Q, now with Zorro in his ancestry.