Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

101 Chapter Seventeen World War I For countless millions World War I brought death, destruction and desolation. Frank Mitchell was, in personal terms, more fortunate. He was a brave man, and war time service brought him new opportunities. His powers of leadership added authority to his responsibilities, and weight to the duty that he voluntarily gave to his country. When the war started in August 1914 Mitchell was within a fortnight of his 42 nd birthday. He had no need to enlist and there was no call that he should do so. Yet his enthusiasm was such that on 8 October he was gazetted as an officer in wholly different positions in the armed forces – as a Lieutenant in the Royal Naval Division (the equivalent of an army captain), and as a Captain (temporary) in the 7 th Battalion (Leeds Rifles), The Prince of Wales’s Own (West Yorkshire Regiment). Being unable to serve in two places, Mitchell then chose the Leeds Rifles. This was a territorial battalion and the immense attraction for Mitchell was that the commanding officer was Lt-Col. Stanley Jackson, the great Yorkshire player, whose own powers of leadership had been so well deployed in an earlier era in the 1905 Tests against Australia. Mitchell was to remain in the Territorial Army for the next three years. The 2/7 th West Yorkshires were one of seven battalions who made up the 185 th Brigade, a reserve territorial brigade which was one of three brigades who made up the 62 nd (2 nd West Riding) Division later placed under the command of Major-General Walter Braithwaite. On 31 August 1914 the War Office had issued instructions that the Territorials should form reserve units. The first lines of those units were almost immediately sent to France, and the second line, including therefore the 2 nd West Ridings, remained in England to provide training and reinforcement formations, with the purpose of then drafting men into the front line. So it was that the 49 th (West Riding) Division, a first line division, were in France by March 1915, whilst the 62 nd (2nd West Riding) Division were being trained in England. As a fine shot and horseman, Mitchell was soon heavily involved in that training work, and on 22 April he was gazetted as a temporary Major. His formal rank remained as a Captain. He was also then immediately given the position of a Brigade Major attached to a Headquarters Unit. Twenty years later, in 1935, Mitchell wrote extensively about his first two wartime years in the Army when his memoirs My Innings were serialised in The Cricketer. When he died in late 1935, he was just about to write of his war time experiences in France from early 1917. The consequence is that direct knowledge of his war time work in England is easily available, but not of his battle experience in France. Many