Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

generous with information about her uncle, read geography at Leeds University, and like so many of this gifted family, taught. Among her pupils at Westhoughton was Mike Watkinson, the Lancashire skipper and now cricket manager. Thus do the connections accumulate. Tragically, it must also be added that two died in a drowning accident in 1926. Two of George Duckworth’s younger sisters, Bessie and Dorothy, herself having obtained a place at Warrington Secondary School, perished, along with a school-friend, in the treacherous currents off the North Welsh coast. Dorothy was one of twins, and, finally, there was another set of twins, one of whom, Walter, went to Lymm Grammar School and Chester Training College. His teaching career was, unhappily cut short when he was killed on RAF duty early in the Second World War. It was a family, then, that suffered sadness and bereavement, but the astonishing compound of scholastic talents, allied with a will to commit those talents in the public service, has endured down the generations of Duckworths. It is said in the family that they could together have staffed a large school and taught all the subjects. It would be difficult to overestimate the effect of this hard-working ambience on the life of George Duckworth. Moreover, his mother, Elizabeth, and his oldest sister, Annie, always claimed that ‘he was the brightest of the lot.’ He was certainly bright enough – academically and entrepreneurially – to charge the dull, lazy if well-to-do fee-payers at the Grammar School twopence and threepence a time to do their homework. Whether their parents knew there were these unofficial ‘extras’, as the jargon of private schooling has it, is a moot point. He was, quite simply, brilliant. He was first in most subjects and, with prizes limited to two a pupil, he carried of the awards for maths and Latin, winning such texts as the novels of Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell, The Myths of Mexico and Peru and The Oxford Book of English Verse , huge portions of which, according to his sister, Annie, he effortlessly memorised. Indeed, in a fashion strangely akin to the Bloomsbury Group, at whose fringes the other George Duckworth lurked, he carried his learning with an unforced ease. Youth Other factors were at work. His was a three year scholarship and, at fifteen, he suddenly left grammar school without completing 10 The Background