Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

Possibly the essential conservative romanticism of Cardus played him false. The beginnings of a change of attitude among cricket’s professionals between the wars destroyed his hitherto not imprecise caricature. Herbert Sutcliffe, wearing Saville Row suits, driving a Bentley and, asserted an aghast Neville Cardus, ‘speaking not with the accents of Yorkshire but of Teddington’, was a particular bone of contention. It was the right choice in the respect that Herbert Sutcliffe, along with Wally Hammond and one or two others, were forging the trail that eventually led to the abandonment of the gentleman/player division in 1963. Bill Bowes, like George Duckworth a past grammar schoolboy and future journalist, admired Sutcliffe’s determination to become what Cardus, as Derek Birley, a noted social historian of cricket, pointed out, rather mean-spiritedly termed ‘a man of bourgeois profession’. Sutcliffe once told Bowes to put his blazer on for lunch and, when the Yorkshire fast bowler rejoined that the amateur captain was not wearing his blazer, Herbert Sutcliffe severely told him that they had ‘to be better than the amateurs.’ He certainly out-heroded Herod. He first ran sports outfitters and then worked prosperously in the paper trade, and, where his great predecessors like George Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes had ended up as coaches at public schools, Sutcliffe sent his son, WilliamHerbert Hobbs Sutcliffe, to Rydal. Like Henry Cotton in the same era and on the golf course, Sutcliffe and Hammond were anxious for cricket to rise from a trade to a profession, their realised ambition not to wreck but to join the establishment. They were parvenus, more Roy Jenkins than Harold Wilson, perhaps. Neville Cardus was somewhat caught between two stools. With painful self-consciousness, Alan Bennett, in his bathetic comedy, The Lady in the Van , includes two self-portraits. One is the compassionate, civic-minded person, caring for the lady tramp’s welfare; the other is the observant writer, aware that she makes for splendid copy. Poor Neville Cardus saw the sources of his copy changing into middle class gentry before his very eyes. George Duckworth was much more comfortable in his origins and breeding than the likes of Wally Hammond or Herbert Sutcliffe. He was less socially concerned and less financially minded. In that sense, he enjoyed a spirited sort of independence, to which they, with what some authorities viewed as their pretensions, could not so easily aspire. He could embrace being a gentleman tenant farmer-cum-freemason-cum-Conservative club member with all The Legacy 65