Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

35 Never a run even stumble 22 yards in his batting gear. Nothing could be further from the truth. He clearly was a far better batsman, at club level at least, than those two brief innings might suggest. Let’s instead think of him, with some sadness, as being one of those unlucky cricketers for whom things just seem to contrive to go wrong - very wrong - when it really matters. Baker, butcher, cricketer A while back I was careful to write that Harry Wilson was the only British cricketer of the 20th or 21st centuries to suffer the fate of being ‘run out 0’ in both innings of his only first-class match. For one other Briton has also had this desperate experience, though this was in 1875 and the amount of information available about the man, and the match, is rather less than I have been able to track down about Wilson. The gentleman in question - I should say ‘player’, for he was a professional cricketer - was one Edward Baker . Born on 9 February 1846 in the small Kent village of Plaxtol, on the north side of the Weald just north of Tonbridge 25 , he was the son of a butcher (described in the 1851 census as a “jobbing butcher and veterinary surgeon”) and early in his life he and his brothers followed the same profession. By the 1871 census, however, Edward was a ‘professional cricketer’, still living in Plaxtol. About his career as a cricketer there is disappointingly little to tell. In 1871 and 1872 he was apparently engaged as a professional by the Kersal club in Salford, though I have been unable to discover on what evidence he secured that post. He then seems to have returned south. In the summer of 1875 he made his only appearance in Scores & Biographies when he turned out for Players of Tonbridge v Gentlemen of Tonbridge on 9 and 10 July 26 ; he had not appeared in the same fixture in 1874, and neither had he appeared in the Kent Colts match played at Tonbridge in 1874, though this was a match that S & B tells us was ‘under the patronage of Lord Harris [and] was got up to discover “latent talent” in Kent’. Perhaps by this point his talent was no longer latent, though the evidence for such a conclusion is lacking. He might also have had a chance to show that talent in the match between the Kent county team and XIV Colts of Kent at Catford early in May 1875, but once again his name is conspicuous in the scorecard by its absence. So by the later part of July 1875 the only evidence we have of his abilities is that match at Tonbridge earlier in the month. According to S & B he batted at number nine for the Players and scored nine before being dismissed - run out, as it happens. When the amateurs batted he took five wickets, including the two top scorers and three who batted in the lower order. On 24 July Bell’s Life wrote of this match: ‘The bowling of Baker was particularly good, and we think it would be useful to the county if the executive would give him a trial.’ Sure enough, the next day Baker found 25 Plaxtol was also the birthplace, in 1877, of Kent and England bowler Arthur Fielder; and in 1891 of Conservative cabinet minister Walter Monckton, who played one first-class cricket match in 1911. 26 S & B Volume 13 page 595