Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

77 No-ball! class matches, between 1919/20 and 1929/30; in this time he also scored just two runs in four innings, three of which were ducks - so not one of the great West Indian cricketers of his age, then! After their two games against Trinidad in February 1920, Barbados did not play another first-class match for 18 months, and did not play another at home until September 1922. O.H.Gilkes did not appear in these or any other matches for the island of his birth. Whether it was doubts about his bowling action that made the selectors keep clear, or whether there were other reasons for his non-selection, we do not know. But his first-class career had come to an abrupt end on those days early in 1920, and he is not heard of again. Or is he? Not as a cricketer, perhaps, but … As I prepare this text, sources such as CricketArchive identify him as “Oswell Hutson Gilkes, born in Bank Hall Road, St Michael, Barbados”, with no details of his death. Many West Indian cricketers these days are memorable for their ‘distinctive’ forenames, but Oswell? Could someone somewhere have misheard? For in August 1924, other online sources tell us that an ‘Oswald Gilkes’, resident of Barbados (‘Occupation: None’), travelled to England from Curaçao on the Dutch mail boat Crijnssen , accompanied by Jeane Gilkes, who was two years his senior. On the ship’s records, they stated that they were not at that point intending to make the UK their permanent home. Maybe they didn’t. But lo and behold, late in 1932 the death of one Oswald Hutson Gilkes, commercial traveller (iron), resident in Hove, was registered in Brighton. Surely this must have been our man? In which case we should now amend the cricketing records to give him his correct first forename of Oswald, and to record his death at the Royal Sussex County Hospital on 21 November 1932, aged only 40. Incidentally, one of the three recorded causes of his death was, rather worryingly, leprosy; but the horrific image of that disease, and the stigma that still seems to cling to its sufferers, are surely now unjustified, and we should not taint our impression of Oswald Gilkes with them. The informant who reported Oswald’s death was his widow, whose name was given simply as ‘J.L.Gilkes’. Surely she must be the same person as the ‘Jeane Gilkes’ who travelled to England with Oswald in 1924 - and as the ‘Jane Lawrence Gilkes’ who died in Hove early in 1982 at the age of 93 (yes, that age does tally with the implied birth date from the Crijnssen ’s records). And now we know this, we can infer a little more about Oswald Gilkes’s way of life, in 1924 at least. For the immigration records show that he and his wife were intending to stay at Flemings Hotel in Mayfair, then and now an upmarket establishment in Half Moon Street, opposite Green Park. To give an idea of the sort of circles Gilkes must have moved in there, I need say no more than that writers of fiction had seen fit to make Half Moon Street the address of such gentlemen as Bulldog Drummond, Algernon Moncrieff (in The Importance of Being Earnest ) and Bertie Wooster.