Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

Despite the grim problems attendant upon industrial urbanism in Victorian Britain, Warrington drove onwards and upwards. When George Duckworth was two, the town was one of the first in the country to electrify its tram service, while buses – basically the salient transport feature of the inter-war years, nationally speaking - had already been introduced to the streets of Warrington in 1913, even as little George Duckworth was invited, nay, ordered, to keep wicket for his school second eleven. Culturally, there was an upside. As the existence of a grammar school, with free scholarships, demonstrates, Warrington prided itself on a little learning. The compact townships of the industrial age often presented this progressive and earnest mien. Warrington had a fine tradition in this respect. Between 1757 and 1786 it had housed one of the dissenting ‘Academies’, places of adult education for those nonconformists who could not legally seek intellectual succour at exclusively Anglican Oxbridge. Like others of its kind, it failed because of financial problems, but the custom of a serious respect for education survived. Warrington was the very first town in the kingdom to take advantage of the legislation that permitted boroughs to found rate-funded libraries. The Warrington Free Library was instituted in 1848 and proved to be a busy and valued resource, not least for the present text. For those more interested in alfresco delights, a series of parks, including Bank Park, Victoria Park and Orford Park, were opened at intervals in the half century before 1918. The park movement was instrumental in providing sporting opportunities as well as horticultural relaxation for the men, women and children of the new urban centres. There were lighter moments. In May 1907 the Palace-Hippodrome, locally known just as the Palace, opened it doors to an eager audience, keen to enjoy the pleasures of John Tiller’s High Jinks company. It had been built in six months, Alderman Smethurst having portentously laid the foundation stone, and it supplied the borough with jovial music hall entertainment. Almost certainly George Duckworth would have been taken to the spanking new theatre. He would have sat excitedly in the gallery, while the businessmen and their families would have been seated in the stalls. That was the way of the ‘integrated culture’ of urban life that survived until well into the twentieth century. Of Warrington’s 64,000 citizens in the Edwardian decade, the central core would have been composed of a large group of aspiring The Background 17