Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

107 Chapter Eighteen A column in ‘The Cricketer’ After World War I, Frank Mitchell returned to writing for pleasure and for employment. He started to have a regular column – indeed often a page – in The Cricketer from 1927, and before then wrote on an ad hoc basis or, perhaps on short contracts, for a variety of newspapers including the Morning Post, The Times, Daily Mail and Yorkshire Post. South African tours to England made him a popular choice for comment and reporting in those years, and he would also write for periodicals and provincial papers as with, for example, the Empire News and Hull Daily Mail. Pelham Warner was the first editor of The Cricketer from 1921, and remained so for many years after Frank Mitchell’s death. Mitchell was not one of the writers in that magazine in its first year. The early contributors were Archie MacLaren, G.L.Jessop, D.J.Knight, Harry Altham, G.N.Foster, and Digby Jephson. Jephson was another player who did not have the easiest of times in making a living whilst preserving his amateur status. His florid style of writing, which included a small book of poetry, made Mitchell’s own writing habits, though colourful, also seem much more workmanlike. The regular column in The Cricketer , offered to him by Pelham Warner, would have been a welcome source of income. He wrote under his own name for all the weekly issues in 1927 but surprisingly and without explanation his long feature column in the Winter Annual was written under the name of Second Slip. He started the 1928 season, again with a column under his name, but by June reverted to Second Slip which was how matters remained thereafter. There is no available evidence that second slip had ever been a favoured fielding position for Frank Mitchell, though he would have probably not have been one of the more athletic men in the outfield. At school, and occasionally afterwards, he had enjoyed opportunities as a wicket-keeper. Perhaps he felt that Pelham Warner was the first slip and that he ranked second amongst the magazine’s columnists. His page, or more, of writing was often the first piece of analysis and comment in each issue. His columns were almost entirely based around his observations of play at Lord’s where he seemed to attend every match of substance from the big schools games, through the Varsity match, Gentlemen v Players, Test trials and the games against touring teams whether they be Tests or not. In 1927 he did go to the Kent v Surrey fixture at Blackheath, a brisk walk from his home, and travelled to Canterbury and more surprisingly to Weston- super-Mare, on both occasions to watch the New Zealand tourists.