Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

74 Nunburnholme station for breakfast at the house, that it was a great feast, that there were tents outside the house, and a string band from Hull. ‘Stanley Jackson was there, Lord Chesterfield, D.Fowler Burton whose son afterwards captained Yorkshire, Mrs Lancelot Lowther and of course the daughters of the house. As I was the youngest I was paid the honour of taking the eldest girl into dinner. She was afterwards Lady Hartopp.’ He gave no description of the cricket. Charles Wilson and his brother, Arthur, were in 1891 (at about the time that Mitchell became acquainted with them) the owners of the Wilson shipping line based in Hull, with 100 vessels. In that year they made astronomic profits of £2.5 million, so it was no wonder they could afford these entertainments. Though Lord Nunburnholme died in 1907, his widow kept the house and estate going for twenty years. When she died in 1927, the estate was sold to the Marquis of Normanby. Incredibly he just used the house as a subsidiary shooting lodge, but the expense was ultimately too much. The contents of Warter Priory were all sold by auction, the house demolished in 1972, the magnificent gardens bulldozed, and the rubble was used to fill in the lake. Though now used by shooting syndicates, the Warter Priory estate has not hosted a cricket match for more than 75 years. Frank Mitchell would have found this all very hard to understand. Tranby Croft, within sight now of the Humber Road Bridge, was the home of Arthur Wilson, the co- owner of the Wilson shipping line. Cricket is still played in the grounds, for after the decline of the family shipping line the house was sold for educational purposes and is now the home of the Hull Collegiate School (previously Hull High School). Mitchell would have played cricket there when the house was at the height of fashion, and perhaps when the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) was also a house guest – though the Prince was much more interested in shooting than in cricket. It was at Tranby Croft in 1890 that the Great Baccarat Scandal erupted and Sir William Cumming-Bruce was accused of cheating at cards. He sued for libel and called a reluctant Prince of Wales to give evidence in the case, but it took the jury only a quarter of an hour to find against Sir William. The scandal excited the whole nation and Mitchell, living in East Yorkshire, would have been well aware of the local gossip. Mitchell named more than twenty great English and Irish houses where he enjoyed the pleasures of this relaxing cricket. They included Wighill Park, the home rented by Lord Hawke, and Belmont near Faversham, the home of Lord Harris where sheep now graze on the field once used for cricket, and where the pavilion is now a holiday cottage. Mitchell’s  list of large houses – at which he was entertained, but are now demolished or turned into schools, training colleges, care homes and a variety of other usages and from which the initial families have now gone – seems endless. Amongst those he mentioned were Hungerton Hall at Grantham, home of his friend Sir Arthur Priestley; Westbury at Frensham in Surrey, the home of the Charrington brewing family; Wilton House, near Salisbury, seat of the Earls of Pembroke; St Giles House at Wimborne in Dorset, home to the Earls of Shaftesbury; The Mount at Faversham where lived the Neames Country house cricket before World War I