Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

75 three for the visitors. Before the match the Barbados Globe named eight players from the island who they reckoned to be “a strong contingent to encounter under any circumstances”; they also named a further four players, and concluded that with this squad “we should be quite safe”, though the paper acknowledged that net practice would be needed to get all these players into form. Among the 12 named by the newspaper (though not, at this stage, by the official selectors) were two cricketers with the surname Gilkes. B.I. (Benjamin Irvine) Gilkes was named in the paper’s ‘first eight’, while O.H.Gilkes was one of the extra four who completed the paper’s 12. We don’t know, even now, if they were related; Gilkes is not a particularly uncommon surname in Barbados. Indeed, there was certainly enough time between their respective birthdates (O.H. on 25 February 1892, B.I. on 16 March 1893) for them to have been brothers. But no evidence has been found which either confirms or refutes this possibility. The official Barbados squad - the names of the full squad are sadly lost to posterity - held two practice matches towards the end of January. The brief report of these matches in the Globe makes no mention of either Gilkes, but the team selected for the first match included O.H. but not B.I., to make his first-class debut alongside such contemporary West Indian giants as George Challenor and Percy Tarilton. Scorecard evidence - we have no other - suggests that O.H.Gilkes was principally a bowler, though what his bowling style may have been is not recorded. He came on as first change in the Trinidad first innings, but later batted down at number nine. When he bowled early on the first day of his debut match he had a chance missed in the slips off his third delivery. Despite this, he was rested after just a few overs. Later in the day Gilkes was given a second spell, and met with more success: he took the eighth wicket of the innings with his fifth ball of this spell when he bowled Trinidadian debutant Ray Maingot. But ten runs later it all went wrong for him when “an objection [was] raised to Gilkes’ delivery, which did not satisfy the visiting umpire”. This gentleman, F.Gouveia, was also making his first appearance in a first-class match, and in those circumstances it was surely a brave decision to no-ball one of the opposition bowlers, on the latter’s home ground. Only one of Gilkes’s deliveries had been called as a no-ball, but this was enough to prompt his captain, Harold Austin, to ‘do the right thing’ and take him out of the attack. Perversely, this had the effect of hastening the end of Trinidad’s innings, for Gilkes’s replacement, C.F. ‘Don’ Browne - also on debut, and bowling for the first time in the match - took their two remaining wickets in five balls, including dismissing Ray Maingot’s cousin Arthur with his very first delivery. 53 53 Later in the match Browne scored 137 in Barbados’s only innings. His feat of both scoring a century, and taking a wicket with his first ball, in his debut match remains unique. Notts’ F.W.Stocks, and sometime Australian captain Kim Hughes, both achieved the ‘century on debut’ and ‘wicket with first ball’ feats, but neither recorded both these achievements in the same match. No-ball!