Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

that ability to tread the corridors of power as well as the passageways of mundane happening with the Kiplingesque capacity to ‘fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run’, and the essential Duckworth begins to emerge. Understandably, his family members, remembering him from their childhood and young adulthood, reject too strong an emphasis on the typical Lancashire lad appraisal, whilst acknowledging George’s decent pride in his neighbourhood and upbringing. To them, of course, he was much more the erudite figure, appreciative of Rupert Brooke and the other Great War poets, the friendly father and uncle, as ready with intelligent conversation of a literary, geographic or historical bent as with an astute estimate of Warrington’s latest rugby league signing. In brief, he was a three-, not a two-dimensional figure. Neville Cardus had some inkling of this. He did insist on seeing ‘George as a Lancashire lad, without ‘side’, genuine to the bone’s marrow’, and that rings authentically enough. His last sighting of ‘Ducky’ before he died was of him standing alone outside London’s Baker Street underground station, following the Rugby League cup final, a rosette on his lapel. Cardus was on a bus and could not thus speak with him, but he marvelled at ‘the famous Duckworth, loved here and at the other end of the earth, standing alone waiting modestly for a bus.’ He hailed him rightly as ‘a chip of the true, grand Lancastrian block’, and deservedly so. Then he wrote of walking the lanes around Ashby-de-la-Zouch, during a county match there, with George Duckworth in the early seasons of his career. He told the supreme cricket writer that, if he could have his way, he would tour the country, preaching temperance, ‘a natural reaction’, added Cardus, ‘in the Lancashire XI of that great epoch of invincibility.’ But he may not have fully comprehended. He spoke of George Duckworth taking ‘the trouble to read Rudyard Kipling’s Kim ,’ in preparation for visiting India ‘in charge of scoring or baggage’. He patronisingly makes it sound as if this was the mildly amusing whim of the rather uneducated man, suddenly snatching at a ha’porth of self-improvement, prior to undertaking a rather menial portering stint on the sub-continent. Not, that is, the teenage prodigy who had trounced the toffs at Latin and maths at Warrington Grammar School and was embarking successfully on leading and supervising politically sensitive and diplomatically exacting tours to India. 64 The Legacy