Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

26 game against Middlesex had many of the features of the Nottinghamshire fixture. A wet pitch tested batting ability to the full and batsmen on both sides failed to pass the test. The full scores were Middlesex 92 and 63, Yorkshire 81 and 75 for seven, the visitors again winning by three wickets. Mitchell, now sensibly placed behind Tunnicliffe and Brown in the batting order, would not have endeared himself by being run out for 0 in the first innings and scoring just 7 in his second knock. Still his seven runs were only two short of the nine runs made by Lord Hawke, Brown and the fine amateur Ernest Smith in their six innings in that match! Now it was time to return to the Cambridge side. However the early season batting magic had gone. In his first seven Cambridge innings he had scored 324 runs at an average of 46, but now in his next eight innings added only another 100 at an average of 12.5. Sadly in one of these midsummer games – MCC v Cambridge at Lord’s, when again he had the chance to impress W.G.Grace – his scores were 0 and 8 whilst W.G. scored 23 (again caught off Mitchell’s bowling, this time at ‘cover slip’ off his third ball) and 196. Mitchell did however, in this period before the game against Oxford, reinforce his skill as a bowler. In only his second month as a first-class cricketer he obtained career best figures of five for 57 at The Oval in a match which Surrey, despite scoring only 222, were to win by an innings. Mitchell, described in Wisden as bowling ‘ right hand slow’ , had the considerable satisfaction of dismissing the first four men in the Surrey side – Abel, Hayward, Jephson, and Maurice Read. Later he also took the wicket of Lockwood. Figures of 32-15-57-5 were more impressive than a piece of doggerel they inspired: Before our young cricketer Mitchell The wickets without any hitch fell, When they said ‘You’re a bat’, He replied ‘What of that, All the more is my bowling a rich sell’. He never had the opportunity of bowling so much or so well for Yorkshire for whom his best performance was one for 16 against Worcestershire five years later, with the wicket and the sixteen runs coming in one over. 23 of his career 36 first-class wickets were taken in this one season. So on 2 July 1894 Mitchell, in no sort of batting form, won his cricketing Blue in his first of four Varsity matches. On the first day, having watched C.B.Fry score a century, he was out for one, before making 28 at his second attempt. Oxford won the match by eight wickets with some ease, having enforced the follow-on. Mitchell’s bowling was again a strong point as he took four for 44 in 21.1 overs in the Oxford first innings of 338, and another wicket when Oxford batted again. Writing in 1935 of past Blues, Mitchell said: ‘My College has never cut much ice in the cricket of the University. As far as I can ascertain, the only Blues we have produced are Sir Francis Lacey, A.G.Cowie, N.B.Sherwell, B.O.Allen and myself, and of these I hold the proud record as having been Cambridge: the freshman’s year, 1893/94