Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

20 India, Jersey and Edinburgh ought to do something in the future. Has developed some pretensions to batting. Pitiable field. So he was still said to be a ‘pitiable’ field, and it is hard to see quite what the pretensions to batting amounted to! But, as it said, he was not going into the sixth form, presumably because the need to make a living was looming larger. He had been offered a job and the eventual prospect of partnership by William Campbell Johnston, a writer to the signet – the Scots term for solicitor. During the season Hex, now 17, was asked to play for Scotland against South Africa, but he could not as it apparently clashed with the game against Loretto. In July he wrote to his mother to say I have been asked to play for Scotland against South Africa on 12/13/14 this month. Imagine what this means to a schoolboy. [Malcolm] Jardine and Campbell are the only other two who have been asked while still at school. Of course I cannot play as it would not have let me play v Loretto and anyhow no Fettes boy is ever allowed to play in a public match. The game against the South Africans was played at Raeburn Place, Edinburgh, the Grange club’s home ground. South Africa won by nine wickets; along with all other games in the South African tour, it was not given first-class status. He had been a very successful schoolboy cricketer in the admittedly rather small pond of Scottish schools’ cricket, but he was not taking the public schoolboy’s usual route by going on to university, so there was no reason to suppose he would go on. This Red Lilly report, on Hex’s 1894 season at Fettes, was similar to that in The Scottish Field. It was sent in no doubt by an exasperated cricket master.