Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

100 but not having private means to allow me to continue as an amateur, may I ask you to allow me to play in the eleven if you think me good enough to play as a professional .’ Diver’s path to the sinecure of assistant secretary was blocked by Read, but it was never open to Frank Mitchell: there is no evidence that his county of birth, Yorkshire, ever engaged cricketers who had changed from amateur to professional, whether in a disguised category or not. Umpiring, a subject upon which he later in his journalism developed strong thoughts, could never either have been a new career for a man who had been an amateur cricketer. Of course he knew after the 1912 tour that his days of playing top flight cricket were now over, though his ability to play more social cricket did continue for more than a decade, though that was to be limited by World War I. There are no scores for any matches for which he played in 1913 on CricketArchive, but he reappears for the last time on that website for two 1914 games. One was a first-class game when he turned out for MCC at Fenner’s for a final match against Cambridge University. A modest 17 in the first innings was followed by a fine 66, the highest score in the match for MCC, and made in his very last first-class knock. Between September 1912 and August 1914 there is no available evidence that Frank Mitchell had been able to obtain any substantive regular employment. He may have tried to become Editor of Cricket when that magazine went into new ownership for the 1914 season but the vacancy went to another amateur who needed to earn a regular living – Archie MacLaren who had spent the previous decade working in a London wine merchants, as secretary to the great Ranjitsinhji, with a Manchester motor engineering business, and as cricket manager for the Australian stockbroker Lionel Robinson.. Perhaps Mitchell was fortunate to miss out on the Cricket position, for the magazine was to collapse with heavy losses before another year was out. The bankruptcy must have had some impact on his social life and pre-war position at Lord’s. He is not named amongst the cream of English amateur cricketers who attended the MCC Centenary Dinner in June 1914 within the Great Hall of the Hotel Cecil. Wisden, which used to record the names of cricket personalities attending the MCC Annual Meeting, does not name him again as being at such a meeting until 1921. Much later, in 1930, he was able to apply successfully for the discharge of his bankruptcy order. By then the world would have long forgotten his once financial misfortune, for it was a very different place. Difficult times – and bankruptcy