Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

This expansive and genial personality was not destined to live too long a life among his family and friends. Having watched Warrington play their old rivals Wigan at the Wilderspool Stadium on Saturday, New Year’s Day, he collapsed in Palmyra Square, close to his home. He was taken to Warrington General Hospital, where, having rarely regained consciousness, he died at five o’clock in the morning of Wednesday 5 January 1966. He was 64. His death certificate states, as causes of death, subarachnoid haemorrhage and mild diabetes, the arachnoid being the delicate membrane that envelops the brain and spinal cord. The streets were solemnly lined for the funeral of perhaps the most famous and popular native of the town. The pupils from his old elementary school stood and watched the hearse pass by. After a service at Warrington Parish Church, George Duckworth was cremated at Walton Lea Crematorium on Friday, 7 January. His character During his later life, several writers, each anxious to pen his biography, approached George Duckworth. He dismissed them all summarily. He judged that they were chiefly interested in what now might be called kiss’n’tell tittle-tattle. ‘All they are interested in is gossip’, he would maintain. This current text has studiously attempted to avoid sleaze, except in the by no means novel – if separate – revelations about Virginia Woolf and Sir PelhamWarner. George Duckworth was, indeed, plagued by journalists for his assessments and critiques. His daughter recalls how well-known cricket reporters would talk to him on the phone for an hour or so on a Sunday evening, preparatory to his unacknowledged views being published in Monday’s sporting prints. ‘If that’s the way they want to do their job, let them’, he would say, ever tolerantly, in reply to family objection. A bottle of whisky might occasionally be a Christmas gift from one or other of these high-level journalists. Beyond that, there was, there is, a strong family feeling that, if anyone should have written such a memoir, George Duckworth was, as a skilled writer himself, the best qualified. That is a belief moderated by the knowledge that, even if he had lived longer, it would not have happened. For all his superb recall of past events, his daughter, Barbara, has explained how he never looked back, never harboured regrets and was always gazing keenly forward, rather than dragging up the past. The Legacy 61