Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

54 Number 11 for the last wicket, their stand ending when Drysdale was caught for 55; meanwhile, Tandy’s own score had risen to 64 not out. The Europeans’ 398 all out meant that the Parsees needed 182 for victory; in the 43 overs bowled they reached 103 for six, and the game was drawn - a result that owed much to Tandy’s fourth-innings resistance. So, September 1900 saw the first instance of a number 11 sharing a century partnership in what proved to be his only first-class match. It took only another eight months, and only another 40-odd first-class matches worldwide, before the feat was achieved for a second time. The batsman concerned this time was Bernard Abdy Collins , a student at Brasenose College, Oxford who, remarkably, like Tandy also earned an entry in Who’s Who and an obituary in The Times . 35 As a cricketer, Collins was principally a wicketkeeper. At Malvern he held the post unchallenged, but going up to Oxford in the autumn of 1899 he faced serious competition. The man in possession as the University’s wicket-keeper was Henry Martyn (“in style and execution he was one of the finest wicketkeepers ever seen in first-class cricket” - Wisden ), and when he left Oxford in 1900 Collins found himself in competition with William Findlay, “a wicket-keeper and batsman of considerable ability”. 36 It was no doubt Collins’s less than outstanding batting that ensured that Findlay gained first nod for the 1901 season. This was an era when wicketkeeping ability counted above all in team selection; the keeper wasn’t required to contribute much with the bat. But when two keepers of comparable ability presented themselves, it was not surprising if the better batsman found favour. In this case, at the start of 1901 this was definitely Findlay. At the start of that season, Collins played five innings in trial matches; his scores were 0, four not out, 0, 0 and 0; it was hardly surprising that The Sportsman commented, at the time of his first-class match, that “few looked upon Collins as a batsman”. Findlay was duly selected for the opening first-class match of the season, against A.J.Webbe’s XI in The Parks. He scored 0 not out and 12 batting at number nine, but surely more importantly he let not a single bye as Webbe’s side ran up 560 runs over their two innings. Nevertheless, Collins was in the eleven for the second match, against MCC on the Christ Church Ground. None of the contemporary sources investigated say why - was Findlay dropped, or was he injured, or was he simply unavailable? Or maybe they were trying both keepers out in the first two matches, to see who should be the preferred choice for the rest of the season. 35 There is consent from all sources (including obituaries and his death certificate) that his surname was simply ‘Collins’, though ‘Abdy’ was a given name of all of B.A.Collins’s brothers, and in later generations it seems to have been absorbed into the family surname. As an author, Collins identified himself as ‘B.Abdy Collins’, though whether ‘Abdy’ here was a forename or was being used as part of a bipartite surname is unclear. 36 Findlay went on to greater fame as a cricket administrator, acting for many years as secretary of Surrey CCC before becoming secretary of MCC in 1936, president of Lancashire CCC in 1947 and 1948, and president of MCC in 1951/52.