Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

65 Having embarked at Liverpool, a total of 20 battalions arrived at the Cape between February and April 1900, and Frank Mitchell was amongst the first to arrive. He had been promoted to Sergeant whilst still at Sheffield and took with him on his journey a magnificent hunting knife given to him by Ted Wainwright of the Yorkshire XI. Further promotion occurred on his voyage for he arrived at the Cape as an acting Quartermaster and as a Lieutenant. That promotion gave him a berth in the officers’ saloon. He may have arrived with a former rugby union colleague, Fred Bonsor of Bradford and England. Mitchell had to make the arrangements for marching north-eastwards to Worcester and there entraining to Kimberley. However the great siege was over by the time of the arrival of the Yeomanry, and part of the difficulty on this tour of duty was then the need to ride hundreds of miles over the veldt but without sighting many Boers. Nonetheless the Third Battalion, joined by the Tenth Battalion, did fight one action when they encountered Boer volunteers led by a French nobleman, Count Georges de Villebois-Mareuil at Boshof. This battle was on 5 April 1900. The Boers were surrounded and seventy prisoners taken, with the Count being killed. In a much later article in The Cricketer, Mitchell recorded it as being a satisfactory engagement, though one of his Battalion casualties was Captain C.W.(‘Pat’) Boyle, an England rugby international and Oxford cricket Blue in the 1870s. In another engagement a surprise attack on a small Boer force led to the release of 50 prisoners whom the Boers were holding. Mitchell was The fields of peace and war: in England and South Africa, 1899 and 1900 Mitchell in the working uniform of the Imperial Yeomanry during the Boer War.