Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

28 the match by 26 runs and remain in the Championship race with Surrey. A low return for Mitchell of 44 runs in his six championship innings had not been anticipated by the Yorkshire cricket committee. Mitchell was given one more chance in 1894 for the County side in being chosen for a non-Championship fixture against Derbyshire at Bramall Lane. Derbyshire, who were to become a Championship team in the following season of 1895, compounded Mitchell’s misery from his last game by having him out for a ‘pair’ in team scores of 81 and 50. Lord Hawke in his Reflections and Reminiscences (1924) wrote that Mitchell had bagged a brace, and when fielding in the deep, missed a catch at a critical moment. Whilst he was devoutly wishing that there was an underground passage to the pavilion, a ginger beer bottle appeared on the ground just in front of him, accompanied by a few distinctly blue epithets ejaculated by some of the knife grinders in the vicinity. He still thinks their opinion on that occasion was quite right. All the same the Sheffield crowd used to provide rather a rough school of criticism for unsuccessful out-fielders in the old day. A curiosity was that Lord Hawke was not actually playing in the Derbyshire match and Mitchell was the only amateur in the Yorkshire side. The senior professional Robert Peel, not a player renowned for leadership qualities, became captain for the match in a strong team that also included Tunnicliffe, Brown, Hirst and Hunter. During August Mitchell played no first-class games. In perhaps another indication that he was not endowed with wealth, he went to earn some money as the tutor to the sons of Sir Frank Hollins, the head of the cotton firm of Horrockses, Crewdson & Co of Preston. All three sons were then at Eton, and two of them then obtained Oxford cricket Blues, with the third a Blue for football. The fourth son, then in the nursery, was later to play cricket for Lancashire. Within a few years, the eldest boy, Arthur Hollins joined Mitchell in B.J.T.Bosanquet’s 1901 tour of North America, and the second son Frank was President of Lancashire CCC in 1919-20. Both boys, like their father, were later knighted. So Mitchell made connections through this tutoring that may have been useful to him in later years. Mitchell’s only cricket whilst he was at Preston was in the course of arranging matches for young schoolboys who played for Sir Frank’s Eleven against a team of another industrialist, John Stanning, a keen Lancastrian, whose son and grandson would each play first-class games. In later years Mitchell was to good-heartedly complain that Mr Stanning would enrol for Lancashire young players from Mitchell’s home town of Malton for ‘ the [Yorkshire] Committee could not imagine that any player might be found in the East or North Ridings. Sheffield and Kirkheaton were their be-alls and end-alls’. When September came, Mitchell found that he had still attracted sufficient important support to be chosen for a Scarborough game between an XI of Yorkshire and an XI of Lancashire, and then for the two major games of the Hastings Festival. Opening the innings at Hastings he scored 12 and Cambridge: the freshman’s year, 1893/94