Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

112 A column in ‘The Cricketer’ batsman’s body, for the crux of the question is the length and direction of the ball, though great pace is of course essential. Moreover the development and extension of this type of bowling would be against the interests and harmony of the game generally......We do not want to see the batsman set up as an Aunt Sally, but we long again to see men like Hayward, Perrin, Spooner, Hobbs, MacLaren and Trumper standing up to the fastest bowling in the world and dealing with it without the retreat to square leg. These great players met pace with steadfastness but the bowling was all directed at the wicket. It is our opinion that the more fast bowling the better. Our men will learn to take a hard knock should it come. So Mitchell set his face against the bodyline bowling. When he wrote his article he had time to consider the implications. The Fifth Test in Australia that previous winter had ended some six weeks earlier. His views are clear enough and he carefully makes the distinction between pace and bodyline. Nor was he as comfortable with leg theory as he had once been. In The Cricketer Spring Annual 1934 he wrote ‘ Used as a means of attack to defeat Australia it [leg theory] may have had its success but most of us are content to leave it that, and we are glad to forget a nightmare and its horrors’. Mitchell then lived long enough to witness the riposte from Don Bradman in England in 1934, and not to regret the masterful batting that largely overwhelmed the England team. The great betting crisis that has engulfed cricket during the opening years of the twenty-first century would have been no more than a gleam in the eye in June 1934, but sufficient for Mitchell to write in that month ‘ We are firmly convinced that the game will not benefit from organised betting. Let their evil be scotched at the beginning.’ The state of Pakistan was not to be formed until twelve years after the death of Frank Mitchell, but the language that he might have used in condemnation of betting practices in that country as well as in other cricketing nations – and the downfall of hitherto distinguished and talented players – can barely be imagined. From the Spring Annual issue in 1935 of The Cricketer , the feature Second Slip was replaced by autobiographical articles under the heading of My Innings. That year there were 20 such articles and a final one posthumously printed in the Spring Annual of 1936. There seemed to be an original intent to write a chronological account of Mitchell’s life, for some of the first issues have chapter headings [I, II and III] but that format was then abandoned. My Innings became rather fragmentary with some areas of Frank Mitchell’s career being barely touched upon. It begins well with good, interesting writing on his schooldays, and his times in Sussex and at university both in cricket and at rugby. The first four Cricketer issues in June 1935 dwell on his touring experiences with his own side and those led by others, and there is a good chapter on My Yorkshire Cricket with excellent pen portraits of many of the experienced Edwardian Yorkshire sides.   The balance of the content then starts to fall away with five consecutive articles on Mitchell’s participation in the Boer War, followed by just one