Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

89 Gorhambury, near St Albans, and the park is now, or was a few weeks ago, full of Kitchener’s Army. In those days the younger girls were quite children and regular ‘tomboys’ at that. They used to play cricket very much better than I did, and one was a ‘demon bowler’. Was this Elizabeth? The Grimston family had been keen cricketers and the Hertfordshire archives include scoresheets for a fair number of matches between 1866 and 1903, involving teams including ‘County of Herts’, MCC, I Zingari and Harrow School. Several members of the Grimston family appeared regularly, and it seems a fair bet that they organised most of these games. The location is shown as Gorhambury but it is not certain where on the estate these games were played. Much later there were two clubs, Gorhambury Cricket Club, formed in about 1924 and subsequently known as St Michaels, and Gorhambury Estate Cricket Club which seems to have been formed in 1938. (St Michaels is the local parish; its curacy had at one time been the benefice of Lord Frederick Beauclerk.) Lord Verulam was president of both clubs. These both seem to have played on the pitch in front of the house which was probably laid out in 1923. When it ceased to be used is not clear but it was certainly there into the 1950s. The picture reproduced on page 90 showing cricket being played in front of the house was painted by Charles Schlumpf, who became the chef at Gorhambury in 1936 and was allowed to stay after his retirement. Born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his grasp of the finer points of the game may have been a little shaky. The picture is reproduced by kind permission of his son, Paul Kingsbury. After the wedding, at St Albans Abbey on 1 June, Hex and Lily went on honeymoon to Norway, shooting seals and fishing. Hex of course wrote up the hunting, though it would seem that this was much later, and his account appeared in Cornhill in 1922. He shot a ‘great bull seal’ but it was lost and sank into the sea. Somehow he still fitted in taking a team to Worplesdon, but not this year a very successful one, as they were beaten by 166 to 65: Hex took five wickets, all bowled. In his team were his brother-in-law Lord Grimston and Geoffrey Gathorne-Hardy, as well as F.H.Bohlen, borrowed from the touring Philadelphians, and P.B.Vanderbyl, a big-game hunter and a co- founder with Frederick Selous of the Shikar Club, to join which you had to demonstrate that you had shot big-game on at least three continents. Nevertheless several of them had played first-class matches – Vanderbyl had played for MCC, F.H.Browning had been to North America with MCC. But this was at least in part a team of his newer friends. In July, too, he played in the cricket week at Easton Park, near Wickham Market in Suffolk. (Part of what was the estate is now Easton Farm Park, but the house was demolished in 1924.) The occupant here was the Marquess of Graham (heir to the Duke of Montrose, a title he took in 1925), who played regularly for a team called Easton Ramblers, undoubtedly a little Married Man