Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

37 himself in the county side that travelled north to play Lancashire at Old Trafford in a three-day, first-class, match beginning on 26 July. County matches in 1875 did not attract the same attention in the press as they did even ten years later. The only report I have found that makes any mention of Baker’s performance in this game was in The Sportsman , where we read that, coming on as first change, he took the first wicket of the match in his third over, when he had Alec Watson ‘cleverly caught’ by wicket-keeper Edward Henty. This was to prove his only wicket in first-class cricket. He ended the innings with figures of 10-2-19-1 (four- ball overs, of course), and was not asked to bowl in Lancashire’s second innings, in which George Hearne took eight wickets for 46, including a hat-trick. In their two innings Lancashire made 164 and 118; Kent replied with 145 and 105, to lose by 32 runs. Following an injury to Henty, only ten men batted in Kent’s first innings, the number ten being Edward Baker. The Sportsman tells us what happened next: “Baker succeeded [Frank Penn], but the first over was fatal to him, being neatly stumped by Mr Rowley in attempting a run.” Edmund Rowley was the Lancashire wicketkeeper in this match (as well as being their captain), but if Baker was attempting a run, then ‘run out’ was the correct entry in the scorebook. He again batted at number ten in the second innings, though this time Kent batted 11 as Henty came in as last man in a forlorn hope of scoring the 39 runs still needed for victory at that point. By that time Baker had come and gone for a second time, run out in his first over; but infuriatingly, no fuller details are available. Kent’s next inter-county match was the return game against Lancashire at Catford three weeks later, but although eight of the side were the same as had played at Old Trafford, Baker was not one of them. His place seems to have gone to Vero Shaw, a player with stronger credentials as an all- rounder than Baker, who was to go on and win his Blue for Cambridge the following year. Perhaps the amateur Shaw was more to Lord Harris’s liking than the professional ex-butcher? Of Baker’s career as a cricketer after his days in the sun at Old Trafford I have been able to uncover nothing, but the censuses and other sources tell us a little of his life outside cricket. In May 1879 he married Mary Jane Bolt in her home village of Cheriton Bishop, on the northern edge of Dartmoor in Devon. His residence was said at the time to be in Dunsford, a village around four miles to the south-east of Cheriton Bishop, while the marriage certificate gives his occupation not as a professional cricketer but as a huntsman. By the time of the 1881 census he had gained a daughter, and was now the innkeeper at the King’s Arms in the nearby village of Chagford. He was still there ten years later, now with two sons and three daughters; but some time between 1895 and 1899 he and his family moved - for reasons unknown - a long way east, to Maidenhead in Berkshire. In the latter year Kelly’s Directory has him as an ‘athletics goods dealer’ living at 26 Bridge Street in that town. Never a run