Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

105 Counties days), the highlight no doubt being when he scored 71 not out against Radnorshire (whose eleven included both Alfred and Chase) in August 1885. But he never made it into the side once the Minor Counties competition began in 1895, and had to give up active sport altogether following an operation in 1905. Apart from Alfred, the most successful cricketer amongst the Green- Prices was his ‘half-nephew’ Robert Henry Green-Price, the son of Richard Dansey Green-Price and later the 3rd Baronet. He first appears in Cricket in 1894 playing for the Ealing club side in London - a club for whom he continued to appear intermittently until 1902. In 1904 he played for Essex Club & Ground against Sutton in a match at Leyton, but did not impress: he scored just four, batting at number eight in a 12-a-side match. He was still turning out in local matches in Radnorshire as late as 1919. But Alfred’s cricket career was much more successful - and much, much longer. From his first appearances in the Repton eleven in 1877, his known playing career spanned 47 years until his final (recorded) match in Herefordshire in 1924. His scrapbooks include the seasonal averages for the major teams that he represented, and totting these up, and adding in known details from individual matches for other teams, he scored at least 12,600 runs in his career. His obituary in the Radnor Express in 1940 said that during his career he scored 25 single-centuries and one double- century; I have managed to track down details of 18 of the 25 centuries (and of the double), so there must be at least 700 runs unaccounted for in the above figure of 12,600 runs - and probably many more. He was in the eleven at Repton for two seasons, and must have had some hopes of playing in what would today be regarded as first-class matches when he went up to Cambridge in 1879. He was good enough to play in the Freshmen’s Match in 1880, opening the batting and following a first- innings duck (dismissed off the bowling of C.T.Studd) with a score of 25 in the second innings; of those who had batted in the top eight in the first innings, only one player managed a better second-innings score. But this was not enough to get him into the final trial match of the season, between the university’s First Twelve and the Next Sixteen, and he had to be content with playing for the rest of the term with his college side. 79 It was a similar story in 1881, when he played in the Seniors’ Match, scoring seven in the middle order in his only innings, and again didn’t get a look- in in later trials. In 1882 his cricket at Cambridge was restricted to college matches, while in 1883 he seems to have played no cricket at all as the demands of examinations took over. This was the last peacetime season until 1925 when I have no record of him playing any cricket, anywhere. After leaving Cambridge, wherever Alfred Green-Price went it took no time at all for him to establish himself as an upper-order batsman, often an opener, with the leading local club, whilst meanwhile playing for numerous other sides - clubs and scratch elevens - as the opportunity arose. 79 In his book The Willow and the Cloth , Christopher J.Gray records that he once played an innings of 157 for Trinity College, but I have been unable to establish fuller details. The oldest of them all