Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

young wicket-keeper, and the same was true in the inter-war period for many of the major grounds. Less so was it true of some of the rural out-grounds – I remember being told by Ken Cranston, even of the mid 1940s, that such was the greenery of some rustic wickets that, as Cyril Washbrook severely told him, ‘you didn’t know where the pitch was until the umpires put the wickets up.’ Even so, the novice wicket-keeper must have benefited from playing so many games on what, effectively, were doped pitches. A second advantage for the still youthful Duckworth – for the apprenticeship for professional cricketers was then usually more arduous than the brief encounter he enjoyed with second eleven cricket – was the mild turmoil Lancashire had suffered since 1913 apropos the wicketkeeping role. Bill Worsley had performed the part from 1903 to 1913, with his peculiar flourish of what he called ‘fluence’. Summoned from an Accrington pit to make his debut at Birmingham, and with, it is alleged, an unusual taste for crème de menthe , he was an early natural for Cardusian portraiture. His contemporary, Ben Blomley, from Chadderton, played intermittently and kept sporadically over his longish career from 1903 to his retirement in 1922, while the Harrovian, F.R.R.Brooke, from Bowdon, sometimes acted as wicket-keeper, when his Army service allowed. The Kersal-born amateur, R.A.Boddington, educated at Rugby and Oxford, also kept wicket on occasion on either side of the 1914-1918 War, and there are one or two other names that appear in the records – F.W.Musson, an amateur from Clitheroe, who was something of a Royal Flying Corps hero in the Great War; J.W.Whewell, a bouncy type of stumper from Rishton who became Blackpool’s professional; and Herbert Parkinson, born in Barrow-in-Furness, the incumbent whom George Duckworth immediately replaced. In short, that immediate post-war phase witnessed some disarray in Lancashire’s wicket-keeping department. The rounded talent and overt assurance of George Duckworth was, then, the long-term solution to what had been a short-term problem. He was well-established and immoveable even by 1924, when Bill Farrimond made his unostentatious debut. The Lancashire authorities might have recalled the scriptural references to dearth and plenty in Old Testament Egypt. After an uneasy period of unsettlement over the wicket-keeping question, they suddenly found themselves with two wicket-keepers of international stature. Curiously, Kent, with both Leslie Ames and ‘Hopper’ The Cricket 25