Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

57 abilities were still not seen as justifying further promotion up the ranks. 38 His last year at Oxford was 1903, when he captained one of the sides in the Seniors Match, scoring four at number nine in a match ruined by rain. Then the need for study took over, and later that summer he secured his BA degree, and left Oxford for ever. Collins had been born at Saxmundham in Suffolk, and in 1904 he turned out for that county’s side in its first season in the Minor Counties Championship. Starting the season in the upper order, he eventually finished as their number ten; in a reversion to type, his last three innings for the county were 0, 0 and 0 not out. He had had two other ducks in earlier matches, and ended the season having scored fewer runs in ten innings for the county than he did in that single morning at Oxford three years previously. And that seems to have been it for his cricketing career. In 1903 he had passed the necessary examinations to enable him to join the Indian Civil Service, and he spent the years from late 1904 to 1933 in various senior administrative roles in India. By 1920 he had risen to become Director of Industries for Bihar and Orissa, to which role two years later he added the duties of Education Secretary for the same two provinces. The year 1926 saw him move to Hyderabad as Director-General of Commerce and Industry, a post he held until his retirement in 1933. He was not done yet, though: between 1941 and 1945 he served the nation in the Ministry of Home Security. He had meanwhile accrued two wives (in sequence, involving a divorce), two sons and three daughters. So far, so relatively humdrum. But there is one remaining feature of Bernard Abdy Collins’s life that is perhaps even more intriguing than his ability to score a quick and unexpected 80 at number 11 in his only first-class match. After returning to England, he allied himself with the Society for Psychical Research and edited the journal Psychic Science , before becoming the managing director of the magazine Psychic News . He also published two volumes of what he no doubt regarded as non-fiction: Death is not the End (1939, revised 1946), a short treatise whose subject- matter is clear from its title; and The Cheltenham Ghost (1948), which examined in detail a reported sighting in Cheltenham first seen in 1882, and apparently still being observed from time to time until at least the 1960s. I have been able to acquire a copy of the former, a painstaking but simply-written examination of, as its subtitle has it, “the whole case for survival”; but sadly the potentially even more interesting latter title has eluded me. As I write it is apparently available online for around £55, but I feel I have better uses for that sum of money. Thus the ranks of first-class cricketers who were also known as 38 Apropos of not very much, it was also in 1902 that (Brasenose College tells me) Collins proposed the motion within the college’s debating society that ‘This house views with satisfaction Great Britain’s abandonment of her policy of splendid isolation’. He was no doubt pleased that the motion was in due course carried, though it does not seem to have fired much enthusiasm: those in favour numbered just six, those against, one. Number 11