Lives in Cricket No 39 - Alec Watson

22 each properly constituted club, and also subsidised Drumpellier CC to the extent that its annual subscription was contained at ten shillings (50p) for many years, so as to allow as many young cricketers as possible to join it. Also in the wider area of the west of Scotland a number of strong and enduring clubs had sprung up or were about to do so, such as Clydesdale and West of Scotland in Glasgow, and Greenock CC; while in the east Grange (from Edinburgh) and Perth CC had long been prominent. By 1860 Drumpellier had become established in that scene, and there were plenty of matches for Alec to play in on Saturday afternoons, while there were also local matches to play on weekdays in the long summer evenings. When Colonel Buchanan died in 1904, aged 79, Alec Watson was asked for his memories of him. Rather surprisingly he wrote: “I am sorry, but there is nothing that I can remember about my early days of cricket in Scotland that would be of any interest to the public at the present time. .... Of course .... I have always had the very best of treatment from Sir David and Lady Carrick Buchanan, but to put it into writing is beyond my capacity.” That, of course, is a great pity, especially for researchers a century later. There seems to be little detail surviving of matches played by Drumpellier before the 1870s, but we do manage to get some glimpses of Watson’s progress in the previous decade. Initially his forte seems to have been with the bat. Mrs, later Lady, Carrick Buchanan was the daughter of a Lord Chief Justice of Ireland and was apparently as enthusiastic about cricket as her husband. She saw to it that meals were provided for the players, and she also gave a prize bat to anyone scoring 50 in an innings. However, Alec was winning it so often that the criterion was raised to a century in an innings. Even so, he still managed a win or two. He often opened the batting as well as the bowling, putting up a number of century partnerships with George Shaw. Apart from his batting, Alec was also noted as a fine and active fieldsman in any position, but particularly in the slips, as was evidenced later with Lancashire. He also told his friend John Thompson that in his young days he preferred wicketkeeping to all else, but another friend, David Griffiths, so excelled in that position that Watson was forced to focus his talents elsewhere, particularly his bowling. Both Watson and Griffiths featured in a ‘Scotland’ side against an ‘All-England’ team captained by Bob Carpenter in 1863 in Early Life