Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

103 World War I 1915 still being a temporary Major. Constant training was interspersed with occasional shooting on Yorkshire grouse moors and the opportunity to have his family stay with him in Doncaster lodgings. Suddenly the War Office decided that the 62 nd Division should do an exchange with the 63 rd Division based at Newcastle but with each Division leaving their own horses behind. ‘It was a rotten turn for us because then our horses were clean, and the 63 rd lot were mangy’. By now, late in 1915 and early 1916 the time was approaching when the 62 nd could expect to be passed for service abroad. A move of the Division to Salisbury Plain was a forecast that France was coming. Mitchell, in anticipation of action, sought and achieved a transfer within the Artillery to the command of the new West Riding Divisional Ammunition Column which would have to be close to the forefront of action in any battles, making sure that at all times the guns and the men were fully equipped for their fighting work. Whilst on Salisbury Plain, Mitchell expanded his Column to ultimately comprise 167 wagons, 900 men and 1,000 animals (horses and mules). Yet France was still not the next destination. The next move for the Division was to Bungay Common in Suffolk. Here there was an opportunity for just two games of cricket. In one the Royal Artillery easily defeated the 2/7 th Yorkshire rifles. In the next game the R.A. had to play the rest of the Division. When the last man for the R.A., a young Gunner whose name escaped Mitchell came in, 35 runs were needed to win and Mitchell himself had only recently come to the crease. ‘I could not help being amused by my partner coming down the wicket to tell me he would get the runs himself. Possibly he did not know that I had been taking part in Test matches only three years before; I did not see why he should have the lot to himself’. The R.A. duly won the match. On 26 July 1916 King George V inspected the Division drawn up around a crossroads at Gillingham in the south of Norfolk. Mitchell was there with 400 of his men who had to march eight miles in blazing heat to the rendezvous and eight miles back. Not a man fell out, and Mitchell was one of nineteen Colonels presented to the King, who remembered meeting the former South African captain at Lord’s just four years earlier. In October 1916 yet another move took place, this time to Northampton but now the Division was ready for France. On Christmas Day 1916 Frank Mitchell Frank Mitchell’s natural authority and powers of leadership took him swiftly to the rank of Lt-Colonel.