Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

The Australian crowds soon came to regard the noisy Lancastrian with some decent affection. The Australian, Monty Noble, wrote, ‘the Lancashire lad came unheralded and unsung. He is exceptionally safe and very active’, and despite ‘his ear-splitting yells’, the crowds soon ‘appreciated and applauded his good work and ability’. Monty Noble also wrote of him that, ‘he bustles along between overs as eager to continue the strife as a boy is to ride his first bicycle, and his youthfulness and enthusiasm appeal to the crowd.’ George Duckworth was not an unobtrusive wicket-keeper. It was said of him in the Antipodes that, if he appealed in Sydney, a batsman was liable to be given out in Melbourne. George Duckworth’s all but daemonic energy was a feature of his life at large as well as of his profession. Unluckily for George, who harboured scarcely a hint of malignity in his staunch frame, one turns to cultural references at some peril, for, in literature, prodigious energy is often the feisty prerogative of the villains, while the heroes are flaccid and effete by comparison. This is very true of Charles Dickens. The satanic Daniel Quilp, the rascally little moneylender in The Old Curiosity Shop , is a juicy example. George Duckworth, the cricketer, as jubilantly promoted discomfort amongst batsmen as Quilp gleefully put the wind up the innocent Little Nell and her weakling grandfather. Shakespeare’s Richard III is another illustration of ‘bustle, bustle’, to recall M.A.Noble’s well-chosen verb; ‘let’s lack no discipline’, the vibrant monarch cried with evident gusto, ‘make no delay; for, lords, tomorrow is a busy day.’ Mr Punch may be a more cheerful parallel. One can imagine him, Duckworth-like, bashing down the wickets with his big club, accompanied by a resonant, swazzle-voiced yell of ‘that’s the way to do it.’ A curio by way of epilogue to this cricketing section reveals that another, a third, wicketkeeping Duckworth came briefly to the fore and then faded rather into cricketing oblivion. He was not, sadly for those who enjoy exact analogues, a third George, for he was Christopher Anthony Russell of the Duckworth ilk. He was born in Southern Rhodesia in 1933 and, apart from representing Natal and Rhodesia, he played a couple of home internationals for South Africa, as well as touring England, with restricted opportunities, in 1955 and 1960. He was not seen, nor was he heard, as much as was George Duckworth. 46 The Cricket