Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

79 Chapter Five Tragedy They say that death is a tragedy; but some deaths, perhaps, are more tragic than others, and cricket is certainly not without its share of these. David Frith has told the stories of the all too many cricketing suicides. 57 Elsewhere, cricketers have been caught up in some of the major catastrophes that have reverberated around the world - the two world wars and other conflicts, of course, but in one-off events as well. The sinking of the Titanic , the Munich air crash, the 9/11 outrage and the Boxing Day tsunami each cost the lives of one first-class cricketer, among too many others. 58 Each of these, and others lost in similarly tragic circumstances, might merit a fuller telling of their lives in and out of cricket. But in looking for potential Brief Candles for inclusion in this volume, nothing pulled me up more sharply than reading, in the Who’s Who of Cricketers , two consecutive entries dealing with unrelated players with the same none too common surname, each of which ended with a sentence describing, very briefly, their tragic, unnatural deaths. I felt impelled to find out more about them; and so it is these two cricketers that I concentrate on in the present chapter. Little Dick from Trinity Richard Boys , known universally as Dick, played a single first-class match for Lancashire in 1877. It was against MCC at Lord’s in early June; batting at number ten he scored three not out and ten, took two catches, and then seemingly disappeared back into obscurity. But there is so much more to tell of his life than that. There is, for a start, uncertainty about his place of birth. The date is well enough established: it was 17 June 1849. He lived most of his life in Burnley, and many sources give this as his place of birth. That seems to be corroborated by the early censuses in which he appears: in 1851 his place of birth was given as ‘England’, and in 1861 as ‘Burnley’. But from 1871 - when he was in a position to supply this information himself, rather than it coming from his parents - his birthplace is given as ‘Scotland’. More precisely, in a newspaper interview in 1894 he stated that he was 57 David Frith: Silence of the Heart , Mainstream Publishing, 2001. 58 Respectively J.B.Thayer (seven first-class matches for Philadelphian sides in the 1880s; later a vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad), H.D. (Don) Davies (11 matches for Lancashire in the 1920s, and later a Manchester Guardian journalist), Nezam Hafiz (six matches for Guyana and Demerara between 1988/89 and 1990/91), and Sujeewa Kamalasuriya (three matches for Tamil Union in Sri Lanka’s first season of domestic first-class cricket in 1988/89).