Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

60 On the cricketing side, in matches where totals were not generally high, Mitchell began with scores of 37, 40 and 31. Though he had some failures, he scored 81 in the first-class game against Cape Colony. He next made an astonishing 162 against the Transvaal XI, at that time the highest score yet obtained on an English tour of South Africa. The Transvaal team included some players with whom he would in time become well acquainted, including the Tancreds and J.H.Sinclair. Lord Hawke’s team made 537 for six declared and won by an innings and 203 runs, so it was a decidedly one-sided fixture. Test cricket In mid-February 1899 and early April 1899 the two most significant games of the tour were played against South Africa at Johannesburg and at Cape Town. In that first game Mitchell, opening with Warner, scored 28 and 1 and was totally overshadowed by Warner who carried his bat in the England second innings for a magnificent 132 not out. The ‘English Team’, as they were described in Wisden, won by 32 runs. In the second match Mitchell scored 18 and 41. This time it was Tyldesley who scored a century by making 112. South Africa were bowled out for 35 with Schofield Haigh taking six for 11 in that second innings and the English team again won well. In between the two matches against South Africa, Mitchell was reflecting on his future employment, for he was then offered a position as a schoolmaster at Pietermaritzburg. It was in that city in 1893 that Mahatma Gandhi, then a lawyer working in South Africa, had been thrown off a train for sitting in a first-class carriage and, whilst shivering in the waiting- room, resolved to fight racial discrimination. Mitchell, judged by later general comments in his writings in The Cricketer , would not have been sympathetic to Gandhi’s campaigning. In that regard he may have been no different to the majority of his countrymen then in South Africa. More specifically he gave thought to the offer of employment and rumours appeared in Yorkshire newspapers that he was going to settle in South Africa. When however, the Yorkshire Post perhaps rather rudely cabled him to enquire his intentions, he gave a categorical response that he was coming home, which is exactly what he did, with Lord Hawke and other team members. When the players had returned just in time for the start of the 1899 English summer, no one regarded the two matches played against South Africa as Test matches. Match records and individual scores recorded in the Wisden records section referred only to games in England or to matches between England and Australia. South Africa were to come to England in 1904 and to play a match against an England team at Lord’s without that game being considered as a Test match. But in June and July 1909 two meetings took place between representatives of England, Australia and South Africa, describing themselves as the Imperial Cricket Conference. Rules for Test matches between the three countries were formulated and passed at the second meeting at which Lord Hawke and Sir Abe Bailey represented England and South Africa respectively. Nothing was Quiet summers, winter tours and Test cricket, 1897-99