Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

12 Local cricket would continue for Frank in school holidays after he came back from Broughton Road Mount School, and later from St Peter’s at York to which he was sent as a boy of ten. Though cricket, and other sport, was popular in East Yorkshire he would not, whilst a schoolboy, have had an outstanding local hero to follow. Possibly the greatest East Riding cricketer has been J.T.Brown of Driffield – always now known as J.T.Brown senior, but he was only three years older than Frank Mitchell, being born in 1869. J.T.Brown of Darfield was the junior Brown and his career coincided with his senior namesake’s, although it was less distinguished and future mentions of Brown in this book refer to senior. Brown was a solid professional who played 345 times for Yorkshire and eight Tests for England. The high point of his Test career was an amazing 140 against Australia in Melbourne in 1894-95, where his 28-minute fifty remained the fastest in Test cricket for over 110 years. Brown was the first Yorkshire player to score two triple centuries in championship cricket, one of which was 300 against Derbyshire in 1898 at Chesterfield when he with John Tunnicliffe put on together the then world record 554 for the first wicket. Mitchell would surely have taken special pride in the performance of a man who lived out his life no more than twenty miles away from Malton. In the years before and after the death of Queen Victoria, Mitchell joined Brown in the Yorkshire side in more than fifty matches. Curiously few other East Yorkshire men have achieved cricketing prominence at a high level. The only other Test player from the region, in addition to Brown and Mitchell has been Jimmy Binks who came from Hull. Binks, born six days before the death of Mitchell, in October 1935, had an astonishing run of 412 consecutive matches as Yorkshire wicket keeper and played in two Tests for England in India in 1964. No East Riding player has won an England cap in the last fifty years though David Byas, the championship winning captain of 2001 once came close, being in the England squad on the eve of a Trent Bridge Test, but not then selected to play in the Test itself. Byas, also from Driffield, was and is a Yorkshire farmer who scored nearly 15,000 runs for Yorkshire over 268 matches. He was a hard hitting batsman of whom Mitchell would also have much approved. The only other man born at Market Weighton to play for Yorkshire has been William Dixon Featherby. He was born in and died at Goodmanham Lodge on the edge of the town. He was sixteen years younger than Mitchell, and an off spinner, picked by Yorkshire twice in 1920. As his local club was Londesborough Park it is just possible that he and Mitchell could have played cricket together in the same club side. The last two East Riding cricketers to mention, before a resumption of the life of Frank Mitchell, are John Stewart Stephenson and Colin Johnson. Stephenson, born at Brough west of Hull, played 16 games for Yorkshire as an amateur, before turning to schoolmastering at Lancing College in Sussex. He was an Oxford Blue and Mitchell, an inveterate visitor to Lord’s after World War I, would surely have seen him score a swashbuckling 52 as Oxford strove to defeat Cambridge in the Varsity match of 1926. In the An East Riding background