Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

102 I’m inclined to think that he never really got over the loss of his wife. Certainly the patterns of his life, which in both his professional and private capacities had been so settled for so long, changed radically in the following few years. Maybe advancing years had something to do with this too, but I am in little doubt that the loss of his wife - who was not just a companion in the home, but also played a full and active role in assisting him in his parochial duties (she was, for example, the church organist at Tarrington for many years) - was the overriding influence on the last decade and a half of his life. In the sunny summer of 1940, Alfred Green-Price was buried in the churchyard at Norton where, as the Radnor Express put it, so many of his forbears and parishioners had gone before him. His memorial there is now hard to find, for he is commemorated only on a stone low down at the foot of the memorial to one of those forbears. A modest ending for one who, it would seem, had given so much to the several communities that he had served through his long life. A sporting life Alfred Green-Price was, of course, a sportsman as well as a clergyman and a loving family man. How he found the time to fit in all his sporting activities we can only guess. For the breeding of polo ponies and cricket were certainly not the only activities in which he indulged. For information on his sporting life, I owe a huge debt to Sir Robert Green-Price, 5th Baronet, who kindly lent me three volumes of scrapbooks assembled, it would seem, by Alfred himself. They cover the period 1881 to 1924; again, was the loss of his wife one of the factors that caused him to end his scrapbook soon after? The scrapbooks mostly contain newspaper cuttings - often, unfortunately, not precisely dated, and rarely identifying which newspaper they come from. Earlier pages are dominated by happy events - mostly the weddings of family or friends - but as time goes on these are increasingly replaced by sadder items, such as reports of the deaths or funerals of members of his large extended family, and of friends. The scrapbooks also include occasional family messages - telegrams announcing births and deaths, along with little jokes, poems and riddles that evidently took Alfred’s fancy, as well as miscellaneous cuttings on ecclesiastical matters, on major world events (the death of Queen Victoria, the Armistice of 1918); and above all, on Alfred’s sporting life. One activity that they barely mention, however, is the sport at which he first made a name for himself. In his younger days he was a footballer, and a good one at that. In an age when the FA Cup was still being won by amateur sides (Oxford University were the beaten finalists in 1880, and Old Etonians actually won the Cup in 1882), he won a Blue playing for Cambridge in the Varsity football match at The Oval in March 1882. 76 From 76 Winning a Blue qualified him for membership of Cambridge’s prestigious Hawks Club, of which he was later a President. The oldest of them all