Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

28 This was the West Sussex County League, which involved Chichester Priory Park, Worthing, Steyning and Bognor as well as Horsham. The Club Cricket Conference, which saw leagues as anathema to the spirit of the game and whose influence was to dominate club cricket in the South of England, was not formed until 1915, and at this time small leagues were fairly common in club cricket, even in its higher echelons, in the south of England. In the League, Horsham lost an away match to Chichester but won all their other games. At Worthing Hex took five for 24 and six for 44 as Horsham won by an innings, and against Steyning took six for 16 and four for 12. The difference in strength between the various teams was probably too great, and the experiment was not repeated. In other matches he took four for 20 against Old Malvernians, seven for 52 against Guildford, and six for 33 against Oxford University Authentics. Hex topped the bowling averages for 1898 with 55 wickets at 8.50 apiece, though he would seem to have missed several games in which Charles and Robert Etheridge did the bowling. This was mostly because in August of 1898 Hex and Kate went up to North Uist, in the Hebrides, with John Millais, son of the painter, shooting. Horsham in late August suffered their heaviest ever defeat, against Warnham Lodge. Warnham Lodge scored 364, Horsham 23 and 13, whistled out twice by George Cox – an unkind cut! – and Frederic Geeson of Leicestershire. In the later nineteenth and in the early twentieth century both Sir Henry Harben of Warnham Lodge and the Lucas family of Warnham Court supported the game. There was a cricket ground at Warnham Lodge and another west of Church Street. Warnham Lodge could field some very powerful teams, and there is a story that they challenged the county to a game, but received no reply. It was common enough for first-class players, amateurs with a free date, to turn out from time to time: both P.F.Warner and G.H.T.Simpson-Hayward played odd games for Horsham at this time. Hex, discovering yet another string to his bow, also apparently took part in a number of plays at Horsham, presumably under Arthur Oddie’s direction! A Modern Mercenary , which appears to have been the first book published under their own names, appeared in March of 1898 to decent reviews, but the sales were apparently disappointing. Hex refers to it as ‘our literary work’ and remarks that it was picked as book of the month by the New York Evening Post. In 1899 Kate again says that he played a good deal of cricket but is not specific except to say that, on one occasion, he was playing in Malvern with the Free Foresters. No Free Foresters match he played in has made it, so far, to CricketArchive , and indeed the Free Foresters seem to have no surviving records from this period. This was to be his last regular season with Horsham. Kate also says ‘he definitely gave up all hope of Sussex some time before this. In fact we had been making plans for his becoming qualified for Hants, a county which he in any case preferred. In the following year he was playing for Horsham to Haiti