Lives in Cricket No 42 - Frank and George Mann

16 Education and Progress of Four Brothers when he failed to make the team for the Varsity Match at Lord’s. There were another seven University matches in 1909 including facing the Australian tourists featuring Trumper, who scored 133, Bardsley, Ransford, Gregory, Hartigan and Macartney, and in the next match against Sussex he scored his first half-century, 58. There was no doubt about his selection for the 1909 Varsity Match where his first-innings duck was followed by an unbeaten 12 as Cambridge managed to save the match at 89 for four when needing 276 runs to win. He played his first three Championship matches for Middlesex, one of twenty amateurs fielded by the county that season, at Lord’s in July after term had ended, batting in the lower middle order. Against Lancashire he began with nought and three, and this was followed by four and another duck, against Surrey. In the third match his 56 off Somerset’s bowling was his best effort, the top score of the second innings, after going in at 53 for five and adding 83 with George Hebden in a losing battle to avoid defeat. From among those twenty county amateurs, Pelham Warner identified something special about Frank Mann and, having taken over the captaincy of Middlesex, found opportunities to include him in his Middlesex team every season from 1909 onwards. As we have seen, he already had Frank Tarrant, considered by many as the greatest allround cricketer of the Edwardian period, and J.T.Hearne, one of the finest fast-medium pace bowlers of all time, both about to be supported by the rising stars Pat Hendren and J.T.’s cousin, ‘Young Jack’ Hearne. Those four, plus the wicketkeeping of Joe Murrell, would form the professional backbone of a very competitive county eleven. It seems that Warner wanted to add a young, athletic, swashbuckling amateur who could come to the wicket late in the innings and attack tired bowling from his first ball. Frank played in all nine Cambridge University matches in the summer of 1910, adding two more half-centuries to his record, 54 against Surrey and 55 against Lord Hawke’s Yorkshire. He managed scores of only two and 12 against Oxford University at Lord’s as Cambridge went down by an innings and 126 runs. For Middlesex, mostly at seven in Warner’s batting order, he scored 217 runs at 16.69 in nine Championship matches, without ever reaching fifty. As we have seen, Frank’s position at Cambridge in 1911 was, at best, ambiguous. He did not appear in the Seniors’ trial match, nor in the University’s five first-class home matches at Fenner’s. He seems simply to have joined the side ‘on tour’ for their last three fixtures before the Varsity match at Lord’s, perhaps securing a place by making his then highest first- class score, 59, against MCC at Lord’s. No doubt he impressed E.L.Kidd and Michael Falcon, fellow Pembroke College students and two of the University Club’s elected officers, who were members of the same side. After the University match he became a regular in the Middlesex eleven, scoring 529 runs in twelve Championship matches at 37.78, perhaps taking advantage of the dry weather and good pitches, ‘revealing himself as a brilliant hitter’ according to Wisden . At The Oval, in mid-August against Surrey, he reached a ‘resolute and skilful’ 97 not out, his new top-score,