Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

Environment The die was ineluctably cast. He was genuinely eager to embrace life as a professional sportsman. George Duckworth embraced the agile skills and epitomised the indomitable spirit that was required of the successful wicket-keeper. That indomitable spirit was Warrington bred. Reared in and by the town, destined to spend his professional life travelling the rail or road link to Manchester and beyond, and fated to die there, it constitutes the single most formative factor of his life, and, as such, deserves appropriate comment. One of the interesting aspects of the study of genetic endowment is its similarity. Much is made, not without value, of the distinctive individualism of one’s genes, but, that said, the human shares 88% of the genetic make-up of the rat, 66% of that of the chicken and 60% of that of the banana. Nor is this determined much, if at all, by the act of being born in a particular area, for no miasmic cloud descends to bestow some sacred birthright. Assessing a human by the accident of his birthplace must be one of the most arbitrary methods ever invented. Being bred in a certain locale is a much stronger guide to character. That brand of regional character is cultural more than it is genetic in fashion. In 1985 the scholar Benedict Anderson vividly spoke of the nation as ‘an imagined community’, and the same is most probably true of the region or the large urban area. According to its elements of a social and an economic kind, a place develops a ‘persona’, and it is this that chiefly inducts children into a format of values and interests. Take the case of Richard Pilling, George Duckworth’s most eminent predecessor behind the Lancastrian stumps. He was born in Bedford in 1855. His parents were Lancashire folk and, when he was but a babe, they moved to Church, near Accrington. There he was schooled and brought up. He was, of course, more ‘Lancastrian’, in that sense of a regional ‘persona’, than someone born in Accrington who moved to Bedford as an infant. The point must be emphasised resolutely, because George Duckworth was, in a realistic, pragmatic and unsentimental sense, a child of Warrington. He was the son of its particular cultural ethos. A recollection of that ambience is not what the fiction and sports books reviewer, Christopher Wordsworth, used to refer to The Background 15