Lives in Cricket No 42 - Frank and George Mann

73 Northern Counties Rule: 1925 to 1928 Middlesex were playing Kent in the ‘Week’, he offered to surrender his wicket when he thought he had obstructed Leslie Ames who, standing up, attempted to catch him. The offer was refused, but Kent won easily by an innings in only two days. Frank passed 12,000 runs in first-class cricket against Nottinghamshire at Lord’s in June and when the Championship season was over, he left the responsibility of captaincy behind him to go again to the Folkestone Festival to have some fun playing for MCC against Kent. 36 Going in at 97 for five and scoring 61, he helped add 136 for the sixth wicket with R.H.B.Bettington, a young Australian medical student playing in his only season for Middlesex, who was soon to return home. Frank had an extra responsibility in the summer of 1928. MCC were sending a team to Australia during the 1928/29 northern winter and were determined to assemble the strongest squad possible in order to retain the Ashes. Instead of choosing the players themselves, they appointed a team of selectors under the chairmanship of Lord Harris, all of whom had captained England in tours overseas, a group which included Frank Mann, Johnny Douglas, Pelham Warner, Arthur Gilligan and ‘Shrimp’ Leveson Gower. In due course they assembled at Lord’s in the first week of August and announced the names of the 17 players they had invited, including the name of the captain, Percy Chapman. At the end of the season Frank informed his county’s committee that he could no longer continue as Middlesex captain. But he had not finished playing cricket just yet. Although he was elected to the board of directors of Mann, Crossman and Paulin at the beginning of 1929, and would continue to occupy that position for the next twenty years, he would occasionally find time to forget his business responsibilities and play a few matches for Middlesex under the captaincy of Nigel Haig. In the summer of 1929, the first season of his supposed retirement from first-class cricket, he went to Lord’s on 20 July to play against Derbyshire, and then appeared in all six county matches in August, including visits to Hove and Sheffield. His contribution in runs was minimal, 128 from 10 innings, but his presence in the team inspired a brief recovery during a disappointing season which took them back up to sixth place, a repeat of 1928. But his most important appearance of the season was in the annual half- term father’s match played at Wellesley House School at Broadstairs in Kent, where his son George had been boarding since 1926 and his second son, John Pelham, since 1927. The captains of the teams were Frank and George, with John Pelham also playing for the school. According to a letter to the school magazine in 2004 from former pupil and member of the school eleven, Charles Marcus Mandel, Frank could not resist an opportunity to open his shoulders and swing his bat despite an unusual handicap: During the father’s match of my first cricket term it was a rule that fathers had to use their son’s bats. As the Mann brothers were such exceptional players, their father, the England captain, was given my 36 He had played his first first-class match for the Club in 1919, the year in which he was elected to membership.