Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

66 The fields of peace and war: in England and South Africa, 1899 and 1900 delighted to find among them J.H.Sinclair, the famous batsman against whom he had played during 1899. In due time Mitchell was to receive the Queen’s South African Medal with clasps showing service in Cape Colony, Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Whilst at Kimberley a farmer named Roberts offered the Yeomanry what he described as a small diamond mine on his land. The asking price was £20,000 which Mitchell and colleagues considered too high, so they did not proceed with the transaction. Some years later when Mitchell was working on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange the same mine was given a value of £2,000,000. Mitchell had initially signed up for one year but, in mid-September 1900, his parents received a telegram from him at their Malton home to say that he had been slightly wounded and was being invalided back to England on the Dunottar Castle liner. He was back in England by November 1900 in time to receive plaudits from Lord Hawke at the Yorkshire AGM. He formally resigned his commission on 28 December 1900. Somewhat surprisingly Mitchell was to write 35 years later whilst comparing the Boer War and World War I: ‘ I cannot leave South Africa before saying that the hardships were far greater than they were in France, leaving out of all account the amount of metal in the air. We never had a bed, always in the open, with nothing to eat but the eternal biscuit and trek ox. Had it not been for the splendid climate, our sufferings would always have been far worse than they were.’ He must have been fortunate with his billets in France during that World War I. There were other casualties over whom to grieve, none more so than Lieutenant Frank Milligan, one of only five Yorkshire first-class cricketers to have died through enemy action. The others were: from World War I, Second Lieutenant Major Booth, Gunner Fairfax Gill and Private James Rothery; and from World War II, Captain Hedley Verity. Milligan died in March 1900, soon after Mitchell had arrived in South Africa, and news of that death must have sent a chill down his spine. The two had played in the same Yorkshire team and on Lord Hawke’s tour of South Africa, so would have known each other well. Milligan, also a volunteer, fell defending the position assigned to him by Colonel Plumer of the Rhodesian Frontier Force, in the attempted relief of Mafeking. Frank Mitchell must have been moved by his experiences, even though perhaps dulled by the conflict to come in fifteen years’ time. He wrote ‘ We found out the weak and the strong, making friendships that will last until the Last Post sounds the call for us all’.