Lives in Cricket No 27 - CB Llewellyn

28 At last on 19 May, Hampshire entered the lists at Southampton against Derbyshire; when their eighth wicket fell at 63, Buck had dismissed seven of them, but after the ninth pair put on 66, his analysis was a little spoiled – 25-7-59-7. He was ill and unable to bat in Hampshire’s first innings, but they gained a lead of 37. He may still have been under the weather, as his figures of two wickets for 131 in Derbyshire’s second knock suggest. As was to happen so often in 1902, Hampshire then collapsed, to finish on 85 to which Llewellyn, in at 37 for eight, made top score of 31. The result, a defeat by 180 runs was very depressing. There was then a gap in Hampshire’s fixture list, during which the England team for the First Test match against Australia, at Edgbaston, was selected; it may seem strange that Buck’s name was among the 14. All of them were present on the ground before the start of play, but Buck was not included in the eleven which took the field. The side which played – among other things it had six all-rounders – has been described as one of England’s greatest teams; MacLaren, Fry, Ranjitsinhji, Jackson, J.T.Tyldesley, Lilley, Hirst, Jessop, Braund, Lockwood and Rhodes. Yet, the Australians won the series 2-1. Llewellyn did, however, encounter the tough Aussie, Warwick Armstrong. Llewellyn’s daughter, Agatha Anderton, later wrote that her father referred to the Edgbaston Test as the only occasion when he experienced an incident of ostracism. It occurred because Armstrong recalled Llewellyn’s earlier appearances for South Africa against England and stated sarcastically, ‘I thought we were playing England, not South Africa.’ Mrs Anderton added that it was ‘the only offensive remark ever referred to by my father.’ It is difficult to see the point of this anecdote. Buck had played twice for South Africa and had lived for less than three years in the United Kingdom. He had played only one full season for his county, so it was not very surprising that an aggressive opponent should try to undermine the confidence of a young prospect, but so bland is Armstrong’s reported comment that it makes one wonder if it is not a sanitised shadow of something much crueller, spoken by that offensive man, whose obituary in the Wisden almanack of 1948 described his caustic press criticisms as ‘creating ill-feeling of a kind which should not be associated with cricket’, and his bearing himself in a way ‘likely to cause offence’. Llewellyn never played for England, but he must have been heartened by his early-season success. His presence at Edgbaston kept him away from The Oval, where Surrey administered a Marriage