Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

62 No-ball! Ireland, Kent and Dorset respectively, while Ernest - second oldest of the surviving children - arrived on 10 December 1857 at the family’s then- home at Bishop’s Hull just outside Taunton. Or at least, that’s what his birth certificate says, and Taunton was his place of birth as recorded in most subsequent censuses. Yet the carelessness with which such records were sometimes completed has led to the 1881 census crediting him with a birthplace of Clonmel in County Tipperary. Ah well. Like his father, Ernest was educated at Prior Park College at Bath, then as now a leading Catholic independent school, though with no particular cricketing tradition or reputation. He does not appear to have attended university. In 1895 he married Brussels-born Valentine Jeanne Natalie Laurans (‘Jeannie’), and their daughter Esther Jennie Anne was born the following year - in France - to be followed in 1901 by a son, James Stanley George, born at Ernest’s home at Widdington, near Saffron Walden in Essex. By the 1911 census he and his wife had moved into London, to a house in Kensington close to the family home where they had been living back in 1881. Ernest Coxon made his career in banking. In 1881 he is recorded simply as a ‘bank clerk’, while in 1911 he was a ‘retired banker’, living off private means. But these simple statements of his occupation do not tell the full story, as we shall see. It is from Ernest’s cricket that we gain a fuller picture of his already extensive travels. Reports of his early career are spasmodic, though we know that he played for the Kensington Park club in London in at least one match in 1880, and that in July of that year he turned out in a friendly match for Dorset against Devon. He scored 43 in the second innings of the Dorset match; interestingly in view of what followed, he is not recorded as bowling in either game in 1880. There is then a gap until late in 1884, when his name first appears in Cricket , as a player in several matches in Hong Kong. He appeared there again in various matches between 1887 and 1893, his most productive season being 1892 when he played 11 matches for Hong Kong, scoring 257 runs at 25.70 and taking 66 wickets at 10.98: figures which, like the scorecards of individual games, suggest that he was seen as a bowling all-rounder. In his last recorded appearance in the prestigious Interport match for the colony against Shanghai, at Hong Kong in February 1892, he scored only seven but took twelve wickets (four for 61 and eight for 60) across Shanghai’s two innings. The 1892 season in Hong Kong is however remembered less for its cricket than for the tragic events that followed the return Interport match in Shanghai in October: nine of the Hong Kong XI in the match at Shanghai, with two reserve players, lost their lives on 19 October when the P and O steamer Bokhara sank in a typhoon during the return journey to the colony. Coxon was not a member of the Hong Kong squad for this match; it must surely have been business or injury that fortuitously prevented him making the trip, for based on his record over the season, he would