Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

19 So close ‘AB’ sometimes provoked criticism, but he gained respect as a very knowledgeable cricketer, and his alert fielding was an example to those playing under him.’ It is that reference to his captaincy sometimes ‘provoking criticism’ that causes me to think of him as perhaps a slightly prickly character, or at least one who stood very much on his own dignity. I’ve no other real evidence for this, and the slight glint in his eye in a photograph that I’ve seen of him in later life may suggest otherwise. At this distance, it is impossible to say for sure. He had other cricketing skills beyond his batting. He bowled a few overs in most seasons of his Minor Counties career, taking ten wickets in all for the county. More significantly, he was also an able wicket-keeper, who played in this role in a few matches before the war and more frequently after it. The Bedfordshire Times tribute commented favourably on his abilities in this area: ‘AB is also a wicket-keeper right above average standard - perhaps the best in the county since the war. But for a reason best known to himself he rarely kept wicket for Bedfordshire.’ He retired having played 143 Minor Counties matches, but he had not finished with the county side yet. Over the remaining 28 years of his life, his working days were spent with the county council, but he also found time to be successively Chairman and President of Bedfordshire County Cricket Club. He held the latter post at the time of his death, aged 72 and unmarried, on 22 November 1979 at the Royal Masonic Hospital in Hammersmith - one of the few times he seems to have moved far from Bedford. For at least the last 30 years of his life, his home was at Days Lane in Biddenham, a village just outside Bedford, in the home where his mother and father had lived at the time of their deaths in 1948 and 1958 respectively. Weights and measures had done well for his father: Arthur senior left over £60,000 when he died in 1958, and the house in Days Lane - a leafy private road with large detached properties set in their own comfortable grounds - was testament to how far the family had come from Missenden Villa. Ninety-one runs, 99 years Of the three other batsmen to score a 90 in their only match, two of whom have the ‘distinction’ of scoring a 90 in their only first-class innings , there is, I’m afraid, rather less to tell. The first of the five to play in a first-class match was Stanley Rimington , whose only match was a friendly between Victoria and Tasmania at Launceston, starting on Valentine’s Day in 1922. At the time Tasmania were one of the poor relations among the Australian states, and although they played first-class matches against their neighbours across the water, Victoria, on a regular basis, the bigger state usually saw these matches as an opportunity to give experience to their lesser players - and still they usually won pretty comfortably. The Victoria side that travelled to Launceston in February 1922 for the first meeting between the states since