Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

6 just about acceptable as a first-order generalisation about the ‘Golden Age’. But, just as there were plenty of professional batsmen from Shrewsbury to Hobbs, there were amateur bowlers. But they remained amateurs, and they were not workhorses. They might be fast, like Kortright or Brearley, weirdly experimental like Bosanquet, or throwbacks like the lobsters Jephson or Simpson-Hayward. Though there were times Hex bowled 30 overs in a day, that seems to have been because he felt like it, and there were certainly times where he was unexpectedly not used much. This may be because he had good and bad days, possibly due to recurrent malaria. For the Gentlemen at Lord’s in 1905, for instance, Hex bowled first change after Walter Brearley and Stanley Jackson, with Jessop and Bosanquet to follow. They were all good bowlers, but there would have been few others for the Gentlemen to fall back on. As a first-class cricketer Hex played for Hampshire between 1900 and 1913, and he took part in tours to the West Indies, to North America, captaining a strong MCC team, and to Egypt. He also turned out for London County and a number of minor teams. In all he played 86 first-class matches, taking with his right-arm fast bowling 339 wickets at a respectable 22.37. He also played a great deal of country-house cricket, turning out in cricket weeks at various stately homes, often in the colours of I Zingari. Many reports of such matches no doubt still lie in local newspapers, probably preserved on microfiche in County Record Offices, but we have enough to give a picture. Though some houses are still in the same ownership, far more have disappeared or turned into conference centres. There are pictures in a scrapbook labelled Cricket Week at Easton Park, Wickham Market . This was an I Zingari week, probably in about 1912 or 1913. The mansion at Easton seems to have been something of a spare part, acquired through marriage by the Dukes of Hamilton, who had plenty of other houses to choose from. After the sale of the estate it was pulled down in 1924, though the cricket ground survived, with the local club playing there until sometime in the 1940s, when they moved to the other end of the village. Cricket, though, was only a part of his life, and much of what he did survives. There are references to Hex in various modern books on Patagonia, on detective fiction, on ghosts and the supernatural, on strange animals, on shooting game, on sniping, and on voodoo. He made voyages of exploration (which he then wrote about) to Haiti, to Patagonia, and to Labrador. He was rated the best game shot in England. He wrote best- selling novels – and appeared as a character in at least one of somebody else’s. And he went out to the Western Front and taught the British Army, and some of their allies, how to snipe and how to avoid being sniped at. Philip Gibbs, who met him there, called him ‘a tall, moody man’. But that may have been the influence of the war. He had gone from an adventurous, even glamorous, life to the hell of the Western Front. Like so many of his contemporaries, he was destroyed by the war, even though it made him famous. Introduction