Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

The private and the public perceptions do vary in one respect. His daughter, Barbara, describes the domestic atmosphere as ‘fraught’ in the economic sense, not because of undue shortage of money but because of the fragility of its provenance. Compared with a lot of cricketers, George Duckworth, realistically speaking, was on a relatively easy wicket, with rational expectations of renewal of tenure. For all that, it was a career that, as well as being precariously short and dependent on continued health and form, let alone talented understudies, like Bill Farrimond, waiting in the wings, relied on annual renewal. Although the phlegmatic George may not have worried unduly, the keeper of the household accounts, Bessie Duckworth, did. She awaited that annual end of season moment, when the contracts were up for grabs, with a certain dread. ‘I wish your father would get a proper job’, she would confide in her daughter. Shift away from the privacy of the domestic hearth to the public stands of Old Trafford and other cricketing arenas – and one would discover thousands of cricket lovers who would have given small fortunes to have played cricket for England and who would have regarded as sacrilegious the interpretation of such a fate as being somehow improper. However, Bessie Duckworth understood the realism of it all and must have been aware of young cricketers thrown on the scrap heap during a time when employment prospects were never propitious. There were lots of cricketers and footballers who discovered that it was not much fun having your face on a cigarette card and no money in your wife’s purse. The seeming paradox of George Duckworth, the potential scholar who plied the cricketing trade, intrigues his daughter. ‘What would he have become if he had stayed at school?’ she asks, with some poignancy. An initial thought is to cite the Somerset Maugham short story, The Verger . (For film-goers, James Hayter played the title-role in the 1950 screened version). A new broom vicar sweeps away the verger because he is illiterate, and, investing in a tiny sweet shop, he soon becomes a millionaire. Asked the equivalent of Barbara’s question by his admiring bank manager, ‘What would you have become if you had been literate?’, his simple answer is ‘A verger.’ Again, one contemplates horizons within which being a regular choice as England’s wicket-keeper is not the sole joy of man’s desiring. The Legacy 67