Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

75 of the brewers Shepherd Neame, and  many other homes of industrial magnates and once great landowners.  Perhaps the only one where there is now a cricket ground still in active use is at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, home of the Earls of Leicester. Though the public can visit that house, the players must now take their tea in the modest modern pavilion. One venue where a scorecard survives for a match in which Frank Mitchell played is for a game played in country house circumstances, but where the cricket was of more than local interest. In 1912 the South African tourists travelled to Ireland to play two non-first-class three-day matches at the wonderful ground laid out by Sir Stanley Cochrane at Bray, in County Wicklow. There the Woodbrook Club & Ground team played the tourists, immediately followed by Ireland v the South Africans, the match in which Mitchell played. Cochrane had inherited the wealth created by his father though a mineral water company. He was able to indulge patronage of a most lavish kind, building also an elegant pavilion to overlook the ground, and engaging some professional cricketers to join his Woodbrook side. He had hoped to persuade the cricketing authorities to hold the last of the Triangular Tests of 1912 on his ground, but had no success on that score, though the late July week when the South Africans played six days must have been memorable. In the Ireland v South Africa match, Mitchell batting at No.10 scored only 11 but his team won by an innings and 169 runs. Soon after, Sir Stanley, feeling disillusioned, gave up the playing of such prestige matches on his ground. Woodbrook Cricket Club had hosted Country house cricket before World War I Country house cricket was one of the great pleasures for the fashionable young men of the Edwardian era. This photograph shows Frank Mitchell and some of his 1912 touring team at the home of Lionel Robinson in Old Buckenham, Norfolk. Archie MacLaren of Lancashire and England, then Robinson’s cricket manager, sits on the extreme right.