Lives in Cricket No 42 - Frank and George Mann

77 Frank Mann: Test Selector headings ‘Chapman may be out of Team. Wyatt as probable leader’. In fact, the selectors did not meet until 7.45 pm that evening at the Sports Club in St. James’s Square and the names of the members of the team for the final Test were not released until 9.50 pm, just in time to catch the presses in Fleet Street for the Wednesday morning editions. But the rumours were right: Chapman was not among the thirteen players selected and Wyatt was named as captain. His selector duties completed, Frank left the club after dinner and drove down to Southampton for the Middlesex match against Hampshire due to start the following morning. The ‘timeless’ Test started at The Oval on the morning of Saturday, 16 August, and on Monday, 18 August, the front page of the News Chronicle carried the headline, ‘WHY CHAPMAN WAS DROPPED’, calling it ‘a bit of secret history’. The text described a secret meeting, actually the official selectors meeting on Sunday, 10 August, in which the selectors had voted ‘F.T.Mann and Jack Hobbs for fresh blood; J.C.White and Wilfred Rhodes for the retention of Chapman, Leveson Gower registering a casting vote for change.’ If Frank had voted for a change of leader there were three possible explanations. First, he agreed with Warner’s criticism of Chapman’s handling of the bowling of Peebles, the most promising young bowler seen in England for several years and introduced into the Middlesex team two years earlier by Frank himself. Second, he knew, better than anyone, that Chapman’s ‘do-or-die’ approach to batting, similar to his own, was unsuitable for a ‘Timeless’ Test. Third, Hobbs had convinced him that, up-close-and-personal, he had observed a deterioration in Chapman’s captaincy at Old Trafford, which had given him cause for concern. 38 At the end of the third day of the Test, on Tuesday, 19 August, Australia were 404 for three, with Bradman not out 130, in reply to England’s 405 all out. Frank had seen enough and left The Oval to travel to Taunton to join Middlesex to play Somerset the next day. Three days later, on 22 August, Australia won the fifth Test and regained The Ashes. Frank came back from Somerset to three consecutive matches at Lord’s in eleven days, two Championship matches, losing to Kent and beating Warwickshire, and the second of the two friendlies with Surrey which was easily won by the visitors by ten wickets. It had been another disappointing year for Middlesex who finished in sixteenth place in the Championship, just one place over the bottom county, Northamptonshire. It was now September and time for the Folkestone Festival where Frank played for MCC against The South and for the Gentlemen against the Players. Percy Chapman was captain of the Gentlemen and Frank was the only selector playing for either side, an indication perhaps that Chapman had not believed the rumours about those responsible for his sacking from the Fifth Test, or if he had, he knew he would still enjoy three days of festival cricket alongside his friend. Although failing to reach a half-century in 38 All three ‘regular’ members of the selection committee were replaced at the end of the 1930 season. In Frank’s case it is likely that brewing now had priority over prospecting for players.