Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

11 An East Riding background Spofforth did not take a catch. So the reader must take his or her pick as to which first big game Mitchell actually saw, though Hull was nearer to Birdsall than Scarborough. This little scenario illustrates a biographer’s difficulties of relying on the personal recollections of his subject when given years after the event. It was not long before, when Birdsall was a man short, that Frank Mitchell had the chance to enter upon the village green as a substitute fielder. He particularly remembered being a substitute long stop, once quite a common position on uneven grounds. Before the age of ten, he was a real player in the Birdsall team, and his first ‘ pair of specs’, to use his own phrase – 0 and 0 – were against the local village of Acklam-on-the-Wold. He was not always available during the early summer months, for the 1881 census records him as an eight year old boarder at Broughton Road Mount School in Malton. By the time of the 1891 census the family had moved to Malton. They lived at 11 The Mount, a large semi-detached house in a most attractive tree- lined road, five minutes’ walk from the Market Square, and with the town war memorial at one end. It would have been a lovely venue in which to have a home, and Frank’s parents lived out the remainder of their lives there. Frank’s eldest brother Thomas spent twenty years and more practising as a solicitor in the town whilst Frank and his other brothers would travel to far parts of the British Empire and revel in the imperial world. Frank’s father on moving to Malton became an auctioneer and valuer, and secretary of the local Agricultural Society. 11 The Mount, Malton in North Yorkshire became the family home of Frank Mitchell’s parents for more than twenty years up to and throughout the reign of King Edward VII.