Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

27 The club report said at the end of the 1897 season that ‘H.V.Prichard has been one of the mainstays of the bowling throughout the season, and we should not be surprised to see him bat with a great deal more success next season.’ This once again was not the case – his eventual career batting average for Horsham was 6.47. His bowling record for the summer was 34 wickets at 16.99, suggesting a slightly truncated season. Somewhere this year comes a note from Conan Doyle, adding as a post- script: ‘Barrie is writing to you about his match.’ This would seem to have been Barrie’s regular annual ‘Test match’ at Broadway in Worcestershire, which Kate describes as the Authors v Mrs Ricardo’s XI (this should be Mrs de Navarro). However Kevin Telfer 15 says that Hex did not appear in any of Barrie’s games until 1899, so he may in the end have been unable to make this one. Later in 1897 Hex had some trouble with his eyes, a problem put down by his mother to overwork. The specialist told him he needed rest, and the best thing would be a long sea voyage. Apparently the specialist also told him that ‘he should stick to one profession’! Obedient to this instruction, or at least to part of it, in February 1898 he took a trip to Central America on the S.S.Louisianian to Panama, where the canal was very slowly progressing towards completion. He kept a journal of the voyage but was also writing stories, reading (he mentions Quo Vadis ) and planning an historical novel based on the career of Thomas Cochrane, though that never materialized. 16 He went on to Jamaica and to Veracruz in Mexico. Later in Tampico, north from Veracruz, he ‘took the “local” fever’, which returned when he got to New Orleans. Kate later describes it as malaria, which she knew something about having contracted it in India herself. Certainly Hex seems to have had recurring bouts from time to time. At this time the Hearst press in the United States was whipping up an appetite for war with Spain over Cuba, and Hex had some thought of trying to get to Cuba as a war correspondent. On the way back he nearly got stuck in New York, sick again and without funds. His mother says that she received a psychic message that he needed money and sent a cheque to be cabled to him. Kate quite often found a reason to believe she had some kind of psychic contact with Hex. But, perhaps of most significance for the future, in January 1898 Don Quebranta Huesos appeared in the Badminton magazine. That was Don Q’s first appearance in print. Presumably this was research from Hex’s 1896 Spanish trip starting to pay off. Again in 1898 Kate says ‘he played a good deal of cricket’. Certainly he played through the season for Horsham, who won the local cricket league. 15 Kevin Telfer, Peter Pan’s First XI, Sceptre, 2010. 16 Cochrane, a successful sea captain in the Napoleonic Wars, was dismissed from the Navy following a conviction for fraud, but then took part in the wars of resistance in Chile, Brazil and Greece and was eventually pardoned and reinstated in the Royal Navy. Horsham to Haiti