Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

Chapter One The Background Family There have been two well-known George Duckworths. Thankfully, it was the other George Duckworth who sexually abused his two younger half-sisters, apparently for nine or ten years. He was the stepson of Sir Leslie Stephen, writer and founder-editor of the Dictionary of National Biography , and half-brother to his victims, the avant-garde novelist, Virginia Woolf, and her sister, the artist, Vanessa Bell. Strange that the only two George Duckworths to become what publicists used to call SFPs – ‘semi-famous persons’, those well-known to coteries of people interested in a discrete topic – should have been around at about roughly the same time. For the man Virginia Woolf called ‘my incestuous brother’, and whom several commentators have thought to be a prime cause of her neurotic and eventually suicidal existence, achieved his wicked notoriety about the turn of the nineteenth century, just as our George Duckworth was shuffling on to this mortal coil. Stranger still that, in background and breeding, there could have not been a greater contrast. There is an almost fictional counterpoise between the effete, self-conscious aesthetics of ‘the Bloomsbury Group’, with its intense emotional fervour and its languidly fashionable conceits, and the no-frills, prosaic earthiness of plebeian Warrington, where the great cricketer was born, bred and buried. The extremes, of wealth, of values, of outlook, of fashions, of interests, present a divide in English life in the first part of the twentieth century that would be regarded as over-stylised, should you have put it in a play or a novel. The older George Duckworth (brother of Gerald Duckworth, the publisher and also the subject of Virginia Woolf’s allegations) was knighted for his work as Secretary of the Commission on Historical Monuments. Although he died undecorated, our George Duckworth certainly wins in the nominative stakes. On the fringes 4