Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

81 Tragedy fielding of Burnley was beautiful, and we have never seen it finer. We think the wicket-keeping of Boys [and the fielding of three other named players] are deserving of special mention.’ He was less successful with the bat - run out for three batting at number nine in Burnley’s all-out total of 128 - but on this occasion that was not why he was in the side. Dick Boys stayed with the Burnley club for the remaining 27 years of his life, almost without a break. He continued to play for Trinity as opportunity permitted until 1873, and later in his career was also a member of the clubs at Colne, Nelson, Lowerhouse and Padiham; but his first loyalty was always to Burnley. He has spells as a professional with Colne in 1879- 80, and with the Liverpool club Sefton in 1881, but in both seasons he was still able to turn out regularly for his hometown club, who had an extensive programme of midweek matches. In 1882 he was due to act as professional for Otley, across the Pennines in Yorkshire, but a pre-season bout of rheumatism (or was it a late-discovered loyalty to the Red Rose?) caused him to withdraw from that engagement. Thereafter he confined his principal interests, as player and as administrator, to Burnley CC. When interviewed for the local press in 1894, it was his proud boast that he hadn’t missed a single Burnley match since - well, the exact date is unclear, but the inference is, since 1882. 59 He did, however, miss one whole season - that of 1874. Late in the previous season, he had surprised one and all by heading to America to join the Fall River club in Massachusetts. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Fall River was, like Burnley, a ‘cotton boomtown’ in the later 19th century. The town’s cricket club played against, among others, teams from New York City, and in their biography of Boys in 1894 the Burnley Gazette reported that in 1874 ‘the Fall River CC were dubbed the champions during 1874, when Boys captained the team, played in all their matches, and had the highest average’. Although he was back in Burnley for the 1875 season, this same biography says that it was not at that time his immediate intention to stay in England, and that in later years ‘at several times he experienced pangs of regret that he did not accept the inducements held out to him [to stay in, or return to, America]’. His interest in America certainly doesn’t seem to have ended with his decision to throw in his lot once again with Burnley in 1875; Don Ambrose noted, in his biographical notes on Boys, that in the 1880s he twice tried to arrange a side to tour America. But both efforts came to nothing and, with Boys, it is to Lancashire that we must return for the rest of his life, in and out of cricket. Perhaps one of the incentives to remain in England came early in the 1875 season when the secretary of the Trinity club (for whom Boys was due to play again that year, though in the end they merged with Burnley CC before the season’s programme had started) encouraged his opposite number at the Burnley club to write to Lancashire County Cricket Club, with a view to seeking a place for Boys in the early-season ‘Gentlemen Colts’ match against the Manchester club at Old Trafford. Boys was duly selected, but 59 Sadly, the facts get in the way of this story, at least as far as the later years towards 1894 are concerned, as he certainly missed the odd match in this period.