Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

37 Romance in the Argentine and November 1891 saw the first in a series of three-day matches between North and South that has run into the present century. The initial match came about when the Leach brothers sent a challenge to the Buenos Aires Club to play a three-day match on any ground of their choosing. Buenos Aires nominated their own home ground at Palermo, where the North won a low-scoring game by three wickets. William Leach, the only one of the brothers in the Argentine to have played for Lancashire and who had later represented Canterbury in New Zealand, captained the team. Walter kept wicket and Stephen, who is said to have lost part of his right foot in a skiing accident and who used an orthopaedic prosthesis and a walking stick, was a rather improbable top scorer with 34. This game set a pattern whereby until 1905 there was always at least one brother in the North team, and all five took part at some time in what became their country’s most important domestic match. With nine appearances, Frank Leach, born in 1863 and second youngest of the Argentine fraternity, became one of the most regular players, captaining the team in his later years, and recording a highest score of 93. Frank’s son Frank Wesley, born in the Argentine in 1903, revived the family’s cricketing tradition, playing for the North in four matches between 1926 and 1931, though without conspicuous success. The younger Frank had returned to England for his education at Marlborough, his father’s old school and the one to which sons of Stephen and Norman also made the journey from the Argentine at a time when returning home for the holidays was not the practical option it has become with modern airlines. So strong were the Leach family’s links with Marlborough that no fewer than 21 of the school’s alumni of that name can trace their ancestry back to Robert Leach of Rochdale. In 1932 Frank Wesley Leach married Viola, the daughter of Ambrose and Winifred Alexander. Viola’s father was a manager Frank Leach, Diana Smith’s grandfather, who was born at Rochdale and went to Marlborough College: he played in nine three-day North v South matches in the Argentine between 1893 and 1904.