Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

133 Acknowledgements My most important source for this book is Venetia Lascelles, Hex’s granddaughter, who found me piles of material in the family vaults and talked about family memories – and gave us lunch each time. Venetia’s husband, David, was on hand to help avoid too rose-tinted a picture! I had help too from Charlie Jacoby, Hex’s great-grandson. A special mention must go to Dave Boorman at Horsham, who showed me round the town and the cricket ground and unearthed quantities of material relating to Hex’s time with the club. I am also grateful to the Horsham Society for the notes on Arthur Oddie. Alison Cassidy, the archivist at Gorhambury, found fascinating material about Hex’s relationship with the Grimston family. In the course of researching the book I visited the county record offices at Winchester, Woking and Hertford. I also visited the libraries at Lord’s and the Society of Authors: at all these places people were extremely helpful. Lord’s also provided the picture of the Gentlemen in 1905 shown on page 73. Dave Allen was very ready to help with Hampshire material: Edward Liddle and Charles Lysaght helped with Ireland and put me on to the Irish Times archive: Duncan McLeish helped with cricket in Scotland. The archivists at Fettes supplied me with relevant copies of The Fettesian . The Scottish National Archives tracked down an article I couldn’t find anywhere else. Claire Whickman, author of a formidable history of Incogniti, searched hard but found Hex elusive – we know he was a member for many years but that’s all. The other wanderers – I Zingari and Free Foresters – have remarkably little by way of records but helped as far as they could. Great Ormond Street Hospital gave permission to reproduce the Allahakbarries photo shown on page 53; Roger Mann has, as ever, assisted with several photos. They also serve who rule things out! So my thanks to Jeremy Lonsdale on R.M.Poore’s descendants, the Imperial War Museum (who hold surprisingly little), Neil Burns on London County club, and Brian Rive on Jersey. Particular thanks to Alan Edwards, who was also working on a book about Hex but who gave way gracefully. There are scores of minor matches reported throughout the local newspapers of Britain. Some I found: some have been collected in scrapbooks. These may not show the year or the date of the match and that has needed some (hopefully intelligent) guesswork. There is an excellent online archive of nineteenth-century local papers maintained by