Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

In all first-class matches the sides played 69, won 26, lost 15 and drew 28. The first tour played matches in eighteen different centres in India, Pakistan and Ceylon, with the team travelling some 9,000 miles between fixtures between the first and last matches in Bombay. Much of the travelling was by rail in the first tour, but air travel, in DC3 Dakotas presumably, seems to have been important on the third. Despite the potential for difficulty, the tours all seem to have been happy affairs. Jim Laker, never one to withhold criticism, said of Duckworth in his memoirs, Over to Me, that ‘he has the whole business of running a tour worked out to a fine art.’ Of Duckworth’s commendable efforts on the MCC 1958/59 tour of The Legacy 55 Duckworth and the third Commonwealth side to tour the Indian sub-continent leave by Comet jet liner from Heathrow Airport, London in October, 1953.