Lives in Cricket No 29 - AN Hornby

82 committee had decided that Crossland no longer possessed the necessary residential qualification to play for Lancashire. MCC gathered together what might have been the cast of an Agatha Christie novel, including rate and rent collectors, a village policeman and a country squire, and they gave evidence that Crossland had lived in his native county, Nottinghamshire, from October 1884 to April 1885. At about the same time, Nash was no longer a regular member of the Lancashire side. He played in only 54 matches for the county and by 1885 he had joined the Darlington club and the following year joined Leyland, where he remained for nine years. He returned to the county of his birth Buckinghamshire, playing for them from 1894 until 1903, the year of his death at the age of 53. In the same season, 1882, that Lord Harris first pointed the finger at Crossland and Nash, he had clashed with Lancashire over the eligibility of Sandford Schultz. Schultz had toured Australia with Harris in 1878/9, and was due to play for Lancashire against Kent at Old Trafford in mid-June of that year. When Harris heard that Schultz, who was born at Birkenhead in Cheshire, was in the home eleven, he wired Old Trafford that he was ‘surprised’ that he had been chosen as he understood he ‘had no qualification’. On arriving at the ground, Lord Harris confronted Hornby and Edmund Rowley. Once again Hornby vehemently defended his player, claiming that Schultz was qualified to play for Lancashire as he had, in fact, been born in the Port of Liverpool. For once, Harris was stunned into silence, although in truth he was correct, as Schultz well knew: he had given Birkenhead as his birthplace on the 1881 census. The production of a birth certificate would have been enough to settle the issue; but Schultz was a member of the Stock Exchange, whose motto is Dictum Meum Pactum (My word is my bond). Schultz made nine appearances for Lancashire and also turned out for Huntingdonshire and Lincolnshire. He changed his surname from the Germanic-sounding Schultz to Storey as a result of anti- German feeling during the First World War. Ironically, after his disqualification Crossland settled in Lancashire, living for a time at Clayton-le-Moors and also in Blackburn. He worked as a general labourer and later as a railway fish porter but continued to play cricket, appearing for Hornby’s old club, East Lancashire, Blackburn, Church, Oswaldtwistle and Colne. When he The Crossland and Mold throwing controversies