Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

57 shooting season started on 12August. So Mitchell was probably otherwise occupied and excited about travelling to North America in September with a team led by another friend, Pelham Warner. The autumn of 1898 in North America with Pelham Warner Pelham Warner was born in October 1873 and was fourteen months younger than Frank Mitchell. They were to become very good friends but may not have met until after Mitchell had gone up to Cambridge with Warner being already at Oxford. The first Varsity match in which they played against each other was in 1895, Warner having failed to get into the Oxford teams of 1893 and 1894. Each opened for his respective university, and each then played in opposing teams when Middlesex visited Yorkshire during August 1895. Neither had much success but it could be that in that championship match when the amateurs on each side would each welcome the company of others, that a friendship began to stir. In 1896 they were again on opposing sides during the Varsity match, which resulted in controversy and unpleasantness in relation to the avoided follow-on. They were never in the same first-class match during the English seasons of 1897 and 1898 but Lord Hawke had noted Pelham Warner and had invited him to join his side touring the West Indies in early 1897. Warner then did well, in the presence of Lord Hawke, during the 1897 championship season when he scored a hundred at Lord’s against Yorkshire. So Hawke who had seen the early progress of Mitchell in 1894 now had two amateurs to watch. Though this is conjecture, Hawke could have had some influence on Warner’s selection of Mitchell to join the brief tour of North America that Warner was to lead in September and October 1898. Warner would have remembered the university players’ team that Mitchell had led to North America in 1895, and may have thought that Mitchell’s knowledge gained in that previous tour would bear some rewards for his own team. The matches were indeed largely played on the same grounds and against the same teams as in 1895. Warner’s team also included amongst their number another player for whom Mitchell was to tour in future years, B.J.T.Bosanquet. The Warner tour was successful for, of the eight matches played, six were won and two were drawn. The two first- class fixtures, against the Gentlemen of Philadelphia were both won. In the batting line up, Pelham Warner usually opened with Mitchell coming in at No.3. Mitchell was the most successful batsman on the tour with 354 runs in his eleven innings at an average of 35.40, a tally which included 128 in an early match against Ontario. The batsman were actually rather overshadowed by the bowlers one of whom, J.L.Ainsworth, took 75 wickets at 6.33 runs per wicket. Bosanquet was not so far behind with 48 wickets at 7.72. Ainsworth’s interests lay more in owning race horses, though, and he thereafter played very little cricket. Bosanquet was quite the reverse. This tour, with the uncomfortable twelve-day steamer journey to and from America, probably cemented the friendship between Warner and Mitchell. Warner later gave him great support after World War I and in time was the leading cricketer to attend Mitchell’s funeral, and to pay generous tribute to him in The Cricketer obituary. Quiet summers, winter tours and Test cricket, 1897-99