Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

9 An East Riding background Thorpe was a farmer, and his daughter Jane Jarratt Thorpe was to marry this Thomas Mitchell on 8 December 1858. He was 31 and she was just 19. Between 1861 and 1878 Jane Mitchell gave birth to six children, four boys and two girls, all but the last born at Market Weighton. The eldest child, Thomas William, in time became a solicitor, and lived with his parents for much of his life. The next child, Agnes, later took up nursing as a profession. Then followed Herbert, Frank, Margaret Helen, and finally Cecil Henry. Herbert and Cecil later travelled to South Africa and made their careers there. The 1871 census records that, at Shiptonthorpe, Thomas Mitchell was farming 220 acres and employing four men and one boy at his Low Grange Farm. By 1878, when Cecil was born, the family had moved to Birdsall, where the 1881 census states that Thomas was farming 670 acres and employing five labourers and five boys. The family were living with three servants at Rectory House Birdsall, probably also known as Birdsall Manor (see Appendix 2). Thomas would have been a tenant farmer, working on a small estate belonging to the Irwins of Temple Newsam near Leeds, a leading Yorkshire family. When still a young lad at Birdsall, Frank Mitchell had initially attended the little school at nearby Westow, that school now having closed many decades ago with the building converted into a private house. It was at Birdsall that Frank Mitchell first acquired affection for and ability at cricket. He watched his father playing for the village side, and Birdsall had plenty of other local villages against whom to play, not least Londesborough Park. Londesborough was the family seat of the 2 nd Lord Londesborough, one of the great benefactors of Yorkshire cricket, and for ever to be associated with the Scarborough Cricket Festival. Alas, Birdsall has not now had a local cricket team for many years and the nineteenth- century ground does not survive. Londesborough Park, however, is very much in existence with many regular matches being played on its delightful and well-kept ground. Londesborough men claim that their ground is the one with the longest continuous use in East Yorkshire. In 1935 Frank Mitchell wrote the first instalment of his memoirs, My Innings, for The Cricketer magazine then edited by his good friend Pelham Warner. Within the article, he recalled that the first big game he watched, at the age of six, was Dick Gregory’s Australians against Eighteen locals at Malton, and that the mighty Spofforth took a wonderful catch. Gregory’s team was indeed in England in 1878, the year when the young Mitchell did attain the age of six. However whilst the Australians played eleven-a- side games in Yorkshire at Huddersfield, Hull, Sheffield and Scarborough, and other ‘Against the Odds’ matches at Elland, Batley, Leeds, Keighley, Yeadon and again Scarborough, they did not play at Malton! It is not likely that young Frank was taken by his father the considerable distance into the industrial heartlands of Yorkshire, so the probability is that the match he recalled was either at Scarborough or Hull. At Hull, Spofforth did take a catch but that was an eleven-a-side match – not one against eighteen players. At Scarborough the game was against an XVIII of local players but