Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

The pragmatic Bessie Duckworth had soon realised that being a world traveller and a tenant farmer was not the ideal combine of interests. This was a mixed farm, with many animals to tend, morning, noon and night. Should an adventurous cow break through the fencing and, like some bovine inmate of Fort Colditz, make good its escape, it was, during the farmer’s frequent absences, the farmer’s wife, at heart a resolute townie, who had to act the part of the camp commandant, responsible for hauling back the cow and mending the fence. It was resolved in 1955 to give up the farm and move back into the centre of Warrington, where a large and comfortable family house in Wilson Patten Street was found, very centrally located. Here George Duckworth lived for the remainder of his life. His daughter, Barbara, and her family would come to share the house with the older Duckworths. Barbara progressed to college and took up the characteristic Duckworth vocation of teaching. She ended a distinguished career as deputy head of the large Penketh High School, near Warrington. She married Pierre de Prez, and their elder son, Hugh, was born in 1951. His mother says, ‘the day he stood up, his grandfather threw a ball at him; actually, it was the day he sat up in his pram.’ He graduated from perambulator cricket to becoming the Warrington scorer before moving on to Minor Counties cricket, although his mother was not too keen on encouraging him to pursue sport as a career like his eminent grandfather. He was thirteen when George Duckworth died, while Barbara’s younger son, Ian, was only 18 months old and evaded his grandfather’s athletic influences. He did, however, inherit some of the older man’s literary interests and is the keeper of George’s poetry collection. All his relations emphasise, as perhaps these paragraphs, however haltingly, illustrate, the picture of George Duckworth as a genuinely fond and involved family man. One cannot doubt the love with which they remember him. The cricket, the fame, suddenly fade quietly into the shadows. He also had the energy to encompass many friends and activities in a life of buoyant gregariousness. The social range is startling. He maintained lifelong contact with his fellow-workers of his wiredrawing days and paid his trade union dues for the rest of his life. In the dark days of unemployment, he would take a group of them on the 9.20am train to Manchester and beg free entry for The Legacy 59