Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

121 at a high level. A note of criticism of Frank Mitchell’s personality came in a brief note that he wrote in The Cricketer in May 1936. ‘ It is an honour tinged with sadness to follow the late Frank Mitchell. Again and again at Lord’s I had evidence of the pains he took to write for The Cricketer. In his contributions, his acute judgement was not tempered by those caustic criticisms that sometimes fell from his lips.’ Sir Home Gordon had more to say in The Cricketer Spring Annual of 1940. As a contemporary of Mitchell and, in the absence of much comment by anyone else, the reader must take note of what he wrote: He (Mitchell) had led a roving existence, but his somewhat moody disposition did not enable him to make the best of life and beneath apparent impassiveness he was painfully thin-skinned. I have heard him dissent furiously because some sentence has been excised in his contribution, and he had not many bouquets to throw at anyone. My impression is that he lacked patience with faults arising from inexperience, and his son who made some creditable appearances for Kent, would have done himself more justice had he not been conscious of the severity of paternal criticism. Jeremy Malies, writer of Sporting Doubles, called Mitchell a ‘ farrago: a racist and bigot.’ Those are extreme words to use of anyone and this writer does not support that view of Frank Mitchell, who was a man of his times. He reflected and followed the cricketing establishment who adopted him as a young man and whose attitudes he chose to accept. If Mitchell can be called a bigot, then so can nearly all who served at the highest levels of MCC and English cricket a century and less ago. As for being ‘racist’, that word and the word ‘racism’ did not come into the English language until the mid-twentieth century. The supremacy of the white race was taken for granted by a British class structure of all types from the rough private soldier, farm labourers and miners to the hierarchy who made up the aristocratic and wealthy classes, and it is a mistake to adopt modern thinking in the criticism of attitudes then common to nearly all. So whilst some past assessments of Mitchell are disappointing to read, even of a man who had his flaws, this biographer prefers to leave the last word with John Mitchell, (no relation to Frank Mitchell), a past school historian at St Peter’s York. In the series that he wrote for The Peterite in 1995, entitled Forgotten Fame , he concluded his analysis of Frank Mitchell with these words: ‘He was modest and courteous, and his name in his time spelt hero-worship to the young. In his later years he was a wise counsellor and extremely astute judge of what was good and what was amiss in the games he had so adorned. He was never afraid to say what he thought, and to his friends and his school, he was always generous and loyal.’ Those words are an appropriate epitaph for an outstanding sportsman. Blackheath, Nigeria and family days