Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

74 there, finally, the matter rested. 50 After this storm in an eventual teacup, Frank Pitcher was left to get on with his cricket without further incident. Unsurprisingly, he had no further opportunities to play for Victoria at any level but, as we have seen, he continued to be successful in club cricket for a further three seasons before retiring from first-team cricket in March 1914. His name does not appear in the summarised scores of second eleven matches in the 1914/15 season, and we may assume that he himself took the decision to leave cricket while still playing at the top club level, rather than having the decision taken for him by relegation to a lower standard of cricket. Whether the state of his health had any part in his decision to leave the game, we cannot say; but in March 1915 The Australasian reported that he had by then been “off-colour” for some time, though he was improving during a spell in hospital. And that is the last we hear of him in the Australian newspapers. His departure from senior cricket had been a quiet one: figures of 5-0-11-0 in his last match for Collingwood against South Melbourne, and no report in the paper to mark his retirement. And however prominent his name may have been locally and, to a degree, nationally in February 1911, the absence of any continuing fame, or notoriety, was shown when a similar silence greeted his death at the age of only 41 on 23 January 1921 in the working-class Melbourne suburb of Northcote. He left a widow, Charlotte; their only child, Franklyn Charles Pitcher, who had been born in 1912, had died just a year later. … and a West Indian In most of the world, first-class cricket naturally paused during the First World War. Nowhere was the break between successive matches longer than in the West Indies. Even pre-war there was no established pattern to the programme in the Caribbean, as the distances between cricket-playing territories meant that inter-territorial matches were played only on an occasional basis, 51 and the only other first-class cricket took place during the irregular tours by teams of English amateurs. Before the war, the last first-class match in the region ended on 13 March 1913 (the last inter- territorial was over a year earlier, ending on 20 January 1912), and it was almost seven years before first-class cricket resumed. The first post-war fixtures were to be a pair of matches played by Trinidad in Barbados, the first of them beginning on 6 February 1920. Despite the hiatus in first-class cricket, both territories were able to select reasonably experienced sides. 52 In the first match, only eight of the 22 players were making their first-class debuts - five for Barbados and only 50 The summaries of the allegations made by Collingwood, and of the inquiry and its outcome, have been taken from relevant issues of The Argus and The Age . 51 There was no regular, organised, inter-territorial competition until 1963-64. 52 Each side had lost one of their pre-war first-class cricketers during the war: H.P.Bailey (Barbados) and L.G.N.Grell (Trinidad). No-ball!