Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

113 and a half pages on the important and successful tour of England in 1904. August 1935 is devoted to three features on country house cricket, and the Winter Annual 1935 and Spring Annual 1936 relate entirely to World War I and training experiences in England. Throughout there is an enormous amount of name-dropping, but  the opportunity to write about his fine cricket for Yorkshire in 1899 and 1901 is almost totally missed – and there is barely  a mention of the 1912 South African participation in the Triangular Test matches.  Frank Mitchell had died before writing anything at all about his experiences in France during World War I, and the reader learns nothing of his later years and family life.   The good quality of some of his earlier writing is thus missed through the somewhat haphazard way by which this series of feature articles, which also vary greatly in length, has been constructed. This is a shame for Frank Mitchell had much to be proud about in his cricket, and his concentration on social experiences is to the detriment of the whole. Perhaps if he had lived another few years he would have rectified this. When the columns that Frank Mitchell wrote in The Cricketer are examined in depth, it can be seen that he was a perceptive writer, not suffering fools gladly, capable of upsetting many in the game, but in many ways admirable, for his time, in his cricketing analysis and the benefits and failings of a great game. A column in ‘The Cricketer’ Sadly Frank Mitchell did not live to complete the weekly column in 1935 that recorded his turbulent life.