Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

As well as that, George Duckworth travelled much of the country, captaining some and supporting other elevens, overcoming difficulties of travel and the preoccupations of his other civilian tasks as he did so. More of the War Fund XI anon: suffice it, for now, to add that these experiences were useful rehearsals for what would be Duckworth’s later ventures into cricket administration. Nonetheless, it was with these gallant wartime activities, and with occasional diversions, such as that welcome appearance at Harrogate, that George Duckworth completed his distinguished career on cricket’s public stage. ... as wicket-keeper John Arlott concluded, ‘for a dozen years, George was the best wicket-keeper in England.’ It is a rational verdict, stoutly upheld by reasonable opinion in general and Lancastrian judgment in particular. The basic essentials were well-represented. George Duckworth was short and stocky in stature, possessed of virile agility and keen eyesight. With sharp reflexes, he normally managed to get his body as well as his sensitively yielding hands to the ball and, vigorously tough, his only serious injury over all those seasons was a damaged finger on his last visit to Australia. His county captain, Leonard Green, said of him that he was ‘one of the smallest but noisiest of cricket artists – a man born to squat behind the wickets and provide good humour and unbounded thrills day by day in many a glorious summer.’ He was ‘made by nature to sit close to the earth.’ He is sometimes regarded as one of the first of the modern ‘acrobatic’ wicket-keepers, reliant not only on anticipation but on an avian-like aptitude. Like George Leybourne’s ‘daring young man on the flying trapeze’, a ballad celebrating the Victorian feats of the French gymnast, Leotard, but revived in the wicket-keeper’s maturity in the 1930s, George Duckworth would ‘fly through the air with the greatest of ease’. Often standing far enough back to avoid collision with the slips, his lateral movement caused Neville Cardus to update his ‘twelfth man’ accolade to propose that Duckworth was also both first slip and leg slip. George Duckworth kept both to the Australian, Ted McDonald, and to Harold Larwood, something of a test for any keeper, as well as to a rich line of crafty spinners, up to and including Hedley Verity. ‘It was a privilege for me to have bowled, knowing he was my keeper’, The Cricket 43