Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

63 No-ball! surely have been an automatic selection if he had been available. He was indeed in the Hong Kong XI for their next big match, early in November 1892 in which he scored seven and took five for 81 in a single-innings affair between the Hong Kong Club (Coxon’s side) and the local Garrison. Somehow one feels that the players’ hearts and minds may not have been fully on the cricket. We may surmise - though I have not been able to verify this - that it was his career in banking that took Coxon to Hong Kong so regularly, as Hong Kong and Shanghai had already become major banking centres associated with the opening of China. But in at least some English summers, notably in 1890 and 1891, he was back in England for the home season, turning out - as did so many gentlemen amateurs of the day - for a variety of club sides, principally the Incogniti but also the Lyric Club, Will o Wisps, Kensington Park, and in a few matches from 1891 onwards, MCC (of which he became a member in that year). He was clearly a strong player even in matches of good club standard, for among the many scorecards in Cricket we find that his left-handed striking brought him such scores as 72 for Will o Wisps against Richmond in June 1890, and 90 for Incogniti against Wellington on the Incogs’ West Country tour two months later; on the same tour he also took ten wickets in each of two successive two-innings matches against Torquay and Sidmouth, followed by six in an innings against the New Forest at Lyndhurst as the team headed back to London. But if success as a cricketer is measured by performances at first-class level, Coxon’s career had already peaked, crashed and burned. Presumably on the strength above all of his bowling performances for Hong Kong in three Interport matches against Shanghai and Straits Settlements [Malaya] between October 1889 and January 1890, in which he took a total of 26 wickets at a little over eight runs apiece, early in the 1890 season he was selected for a side styled ‘Gentlemen of England’ to play a first-class, 12-a-side match against Oxford University in The Parks beginning on 22 May. The Gentlemen’s side was captained by A.J.Webbe, and nine of the 12 were the same as had played in the immediately-preceding match for Webbe’s XII against Cambridge University at Fenner’s. Webbe’s team had beaten Cambridge by the unusual margin of 11 wickets, so perhaps it was not surprising that for the match at Oxford three of their better-known members - P.J.de Paravicini, A.D.Pougher and C.I.Thornton - gave way to three lesser lights: James Robertson (a regular player for Middlesex in the 1880s, who had latterly appeared in several such ‘Gentlemen’s XIs’) and two first-class debutants in T.B.Case (who was to gain Blues for Oxford in 1891 and 1892) and Coxon. Things started well enough for him on the day of his debut, which, the Sporting Life tells us was a day of “charmingly fine” weather. He batted - left-handed - at number nine, and with Webbe at the other end the two of them “speedily hit off” the two University bowlers who first confronted them; but then, after scoring ten in a partnership of 31 for the eighth wicket, Coxon was caught at long on. The Gentlemen were eventually all out for 261, and nemesis approached.