Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

32 his liking for the drive but with an inability to keep such strokes along the ground. His style of batting was referred to by the opening Oxford bowler F.H.E.Cunliffe, writing in 1913: ‘I started my Inter-Varsity career with a wide and a no ball. I am not sure that Mitchell’s habit of holding his bat in the air instead of in the blockhole had not something to do with this ill-omened beginning. I remember waiting for him to ground it and his calling to me to come on.’ Mitchell was rather overshadowed in this game and others by the Cambridge captain W.G.Druce who scored 30 and 66. Druce and his brother N.F.Druce were both fine players and fared better than Mitchell in 1895. Before the Varsity year was over Mitchell had been elected captain of cricket for 1896, becoming the first from either Oxford or Cambridge to hold the double honour of being captain of the University Rugby and Cricket Clubs. He finished the 1895 Cambridge season with 614 first-class runs at an average of 34.2 The Yorkshire interlude Mitchell’s cricket season was by no means over. He had already played once for Yorkshire in 1895, immediately after the Varsity match, opening the batting against Derbyshire with scores of 38 and 63. Later he was able to return during the university vacation to play for Yorkshire in eight championship matches between mid-July and mid-August. As his highest score in 14 innings in those games was only 38, his return to county cricket would hardly have given him unalloyed pleasure. 300 runs for Yorkshire at an average of 20 did not signify too much hope for a fruitful future, though Wisden thought that Mitchell had redeemed his reputation after the disastrous end to the 1894 season. His last game for Yorkshire that summer was against Middlesex at Scarborough, but, whilst his team then contemplated a journey to Cheltenham, Mitchell was about to make a journey to North America where a team under his name and leadership was due to start a game against the All New York XI commencing on 3 September, 1895. The American Tour Autumnal tours by largely English amateur sides to the Eastern shore line of America were popular in the 1890s. There had been sporadic tours from the time of George Parr’s visit in 1859 but the last full decade of the reign of Queen Victoria saw a flowering of such visits with the majority of the matches taking place within Philadelphia. Cricket there was much liked. Golf and lawn tennis had no real following, and the motor car had yet to arrive. Local society enjoyed the matches for their social and sporting content and the horses and coaches arrived just as if an Eton v Harrow match was taking place. This period was the high tide of Anglophilia amongst the upper middle classes on the Eastern seaboard. In 1891, through the good offices of the Germantown Club, Lord Hawke was enabled to take a team that commenced with two matches against the Gentlemen of Philadelphia, and then moved on to play in New York, Boston, and Chicago. This major part of the tour was followed by a Cambridge, Yorkshire interlude and America, 1895