Lives in Cricket No 34 - Frank Mitchell

95 hard to avoid the conclusion that this was a team ready for country house cricket but not for Test matches. Perhaps such conclusion was harsh but the truth would out within a few weeks that this team was becoming too aged, and just not of the high standard that had been hoped for. A long tour of 37 matches between May 4 and September 14 did include 13 wins, but none of those wins came in any major match. Frank Mitchell started the tour by batting at 6. Later he played at 7. By the tour end, and in friendly matches, again against Lionel Robinson’s XI, and Lord Londesborough’s XI at Scarborough, he chose to bat at 9 and 10. In 25 matches and 33 innings he scored just 504 runs at an average of 17.37. Yet there was one magical occasion when the old talent and strong play emerged, and that happily was against Yorkshire. Having lost to MCC at Lord’s in mid-May, the South Africans had travelled north to the Fartown ground at Huddersfield. The Yorkshire side was not its strongest combination but it included Wilfred Rhodes, David Denton, Alonzo Drake, George Hirst, and Schofield Haigh. South Africa batted first and were bowled out for 170 (Mitchell bowled Haigh 8). Yorkshire then scored 317 and South Africa needed to bat through most of the last day to save the game. That they did so was down to Mitchell. With, for once, a tenacious tail supporting him he was 91 not out at the end of the South African innings of 288. The last man, wicketkeeper Tommy Ward, in making 21 helped his skipper to get close to a century but not quite close enough. That 91 not out was to be Mitchell’s highest score of the tour. The First Test, Australia v South Africa was only nine days away, on the other side of the Pennines at Old Trafford and South Africa were to be crushed, thus setting a pattern for the remainder of the tour. Australia scored 448 (Kelleway 114 and Bardsley 121), and South Africa were bowled The 1912 Triangular Tournament The South African team had a woeful time during the wet English summer of 1912. Standing: L.A.Stricker, R.O.Schwarz, R.Beaumont, T.Campbell, G.P.D.Hartigan, J.L.Cox. Seated: S.J.Pegler, L.J.Tancred, F.Mitchell, G.A.Faulkner, S.J.Snooke, A.D.Nourse. Ground: H.W.Taylor, T.A.Ward, C.P.Carter