Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

Chapter Two The Cricket For Lancashire ... Neville Cardus claimed to be George Duckworth’s first victim at Old Trafford in the early summer of 1923. ‘It was my honour’, he wrote, ‘to be Duckworth’s first victim on the historic sward of Old Trafford, playing for the Manchester Guardian XI (there really were eleven of us). I lifted my right toe barely an inch, and when Duckworth stumped me, in an awful noise, I felt I had been sandbagged.’ Neville Cardus, a genial believer in the primacy of aesthetic truth before grim authenticity, may have stretched the tale a little, but it would be reassuring to have confirmation, beyond Frank Roberts’ memory, that George Duckworth had developed the high-pitched yell as well as the slick dexterity ere setting foot in the senior ranks of cricket. There is certainly aesthetic truth in the tale. This was in 1923. Before that, however, George Duckworth, like Cyril Washbrook after him, had flirted with Warwickshire, prior to wedding his gifts to the Lancashire cause. By chance, he saw a newspaper advertisement in respect of vacancies at Edgbaston. Fired with energy by his prowess in the Warrington ranks, with his visit to Old Trafford and perhaps with a sense of the disappointment of a father and an uncle who had, for reasons social and physical, been denied their opportunity, he answered the advertisement and applied for a trial with the Midland county. He was offered a season’s probationary engagement for 1922 and he played chiefly for the Club and Ground side, in part, of course, because he was not residentially qualified to represent the county. Indeed, he celebrated his twenty-first birthday during this phase. He returned home for the party, accompanied, in his typically gregarious way, by several team-mates. Six young men had to share a bed that night in the crammed Duckworth homestead. In another illustration of that amiable nature, he remained on friendly terms for many years with the family with whom he 22