Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

60 next wicket fell at 302, and the game ebbed and flowed until, with an extra half-hour taken – though there did not seem to be any provision for it in the rules – Hex came in at No.10 with twelve still needed, the Nottinghamshire captain Arthur Jones at the other end, and the remaining batsman, Harold McDonell, injured. Epically, Jones and Hex made it. Kate said ‘Hesketh looked very calm indeed, smiling now and then at the things the pros kept saying to him.’ She added that the pros were so certain that they could get him out that they knelt on one knee almost in front of his bat, so close they could almost have snatched the ball off his bat. Then someone appealed against it, it was not Hesketh, and the umpires made the men return to their proper positions. This did occasion general amazement. Albert Kinross said ‘I saw … that immortal finish where Hesketh-Prichard, a ridiculous bat, kept his end up amid yells of laughter, over after insecure over, while his partner did the needful at the other end.’ 30 Kinross was a moderately successful popular novelist – his best seller was Joan of Garioch – who had played with Hex for the Authors and the Allahakbarries. Pelham Warner thought 31 that ‘this was one of the best games in all the long history of Gentlemen v Players matches.’ Certainly this was one of the best batting performances of Hex’s career. Philip Trevor, the Daily Telegraph cricket correspondent, said ‘it was the greatest defensive performance I have ever seen at Lord’s.’ He was writing of a man who, up to the end of 1903, had played 50 first-class innings and eked out 140 runs with a top score of 15. But he had also been, by report, the most dangerous bowler in the match. ‘The crowd,’ says Kate, 30 Albert Kinross, An Unconventional Cricketer , Harold Shaylor, 1930, p.78. 31 Pelham Warner, Gentlemen v Players: 1806-1949 , Harrap, 1950, p.271. One of the Gentlemen Contemporary cartoon showing Hex defending in the Gentlemen’s second innings at Lord’s in 1904.