Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

introduction to outdoor pursuits that would long remain among his interests. When he was twelve, his mother, Elizabeth Duckworth found out about scholarships from her sister-in-law, whose son had won one such. Armed with this intelligence of how to make application, she boldly did so – and George Duckworth won one of the two free scholarships available to boys in the Warrington area. That achievement merits some exegesis in terms of both the school and the new entrant. The grammar school was – always accepting the Swan of Avon – the prime English contribution to the northern Renaissance. In Tudor England they were established in such numbers as to provide, according to a perhaps generous claim, one such agency for every 6,000 of the population and within twelve miles of every boy – for, alas, girls were not included – in the kingdom. Sir Thomas Boteler - the ‘Lord of the Manor’ family name, similar to ‘Butler’, in these parts - established the Warrington model in 1526. This was typical practice, with a well-to-do merchant or cleric usually responsible for the foundation of a small grammar school, this one originally a house in Bag Lane. Despite setbacks, it flourished, with both boarders and dayboys, before moving to new premises on School Brow in 1862. Thence went George Duckworth to school. If there were a downside, it was the elitist wearing of mortar boards by the pupils, for the many urchins of Warrington found them a tempting target. Perhaps yearning themselves for cricketing glory, they were anxious to practise their throwing in skills with snowballs and other missiles. What is incidentally intriguing is that, during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries these schools fell into desuetude, with barely a hundred left in operation at one stage. Warrington Grammar School plainly survived and then, following the 1902 Education Act and the beginnings of secondary education at large, it found itself one of a refurbished and expanded set of such schools. It also found some competition from the new Warrington Secondary School, founded post-1902 in the old Technical Institute. The grammar schools sprang in numbers from less than 500 at the point where George Duckworth would have sought entry, to about 1,200 in the inter-war years. This brief phase of recovery did not long endure, as the application of common or comprehensive schooling, which had served excellently in the primary sector, was steadily extended into the secondary mode. The Background 8