Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

80 Tragedy born at Aberdour, which is a village on the north side of the Firth of Forth opposite Edinburgh. Further investigation shows that a similar confusion surrounds some other members of his family. His father James seems to have been born in Colne, just up the River Derwent from Burnley; while his mother Mary, though stated in some contemporary sources to come from that same part of Lancashire, was actually Scottish, having been born to a local family in Burntisland, the next village up the coast from Aberdour. All census returns are in agreement that their first child, James (born 1834) was born in Dublin, but for the next two children there is no consistency. The 1841 census says that Margaret (born 1839-40) was born in Hampshire, while her younger sister Ann was born in Kent. But there is no record of any child of these names being born in those counties in those years, and while Margaret seems to have died young, later censuses consistently give Ann’s birthplace as Burnley - as do all censuses for the second son Robert, born around 1844. Wherever they may have been beforehand - and if all the above birthplaces are accurate they certainly seem to have been an uncharacteristicallymobile family for the age - in 1851 the family was all together in Burntisland, living at the house of Mary’s parents. But they did not stay there for long, and within a few years they were back in Burnley, where Dick was to live out almost all of his remaining years. They were anything but a rich family. In 1851 Dick’s father was a quarry labourer, while after the move back to Burnley he joined the industry that dominated the town, and indeed most of industrial Lancashire, and became a cotton weaver. Young Dick seemed destined to follow in his footsteps. He was already working in the mills before his 12th birthday, for the 1861 census records him rather delightfully as being a ‘throttle doffer’, in which capacity it was his job to clear full cotton bobbins from the looms and replace them with empty ones - a task requiring considerable speed and dexterity. Within a very short time he was making use of these two skills on the cricket field too. He is first reported as playing as a ten-year-old, on a field off Trafalgar Street in Burnley, in an area of cotton mills and tightly- packed terraced housing (it’s very different today). Around the age of 13 he was keeping wicket - in an ineffective pair of kid leather gloves - and scoring a few runs for a side called either Young Craven or New Craven, and from there he graduated in the mid-1860s to Trinity, one of the town’s principal clubs, who by this time played on a ground a mile or so west of the town centre, at Wood Top. From here it was just one step up to join Burnley Cricket Club, and sure enough, on Whit Monday in 1869 - a month before his 20th birthday - he was invited to keep wicket for the senior club against Liverpool Atlas. ‘Little Dick Boys from Trinity’ as he was known - he was still some way short of his eventual 5ft 8¾in and 11 stone - let no-one down. He conceded only a single bye in Atlas’s innings of 23 and 49 for six, and his performance behind the stumps was specifically commended by the Burnley Gazette , which reported of the game that ‘the