Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

91 was nothing special, though it was one run more than his RA team-mate George McCanlis managed. He didn’t bowl, though six of his team-mates did, and at this stage of his career it would seem that he was being played as a specialist batsman. For whatever reason, Boys was left out of the match against Derbyshire that followed, and it was to be almost six years before he added to his single first-class appearance. We are told that in that period he was asked many times to play again for the county, but was unable to get leave of absence - whether because musical duties required him to be elsewhere, or because he was once again falling foul of military discipline is not revealed! But between 1875 and 1881 he played regularly for the Royal Artillery, and sometimes for other sides too. Despite his lowly rank, he always batted in the upper order of a very strong batting side. From 1876 he was also one of their best bowlers, bowling quick round-arm deliveries, and taking five wickets in an innings four times, and four wickets eight times, in matches whose scorecards are recorded in CricketArchive. 65 Bowling left him little opportunity for keeping wicket, which was in any case usually in the very capable hands of H.B.Kingscote (of Kent and Gloucestershire). Although Kent clearly favoured him in this role (as we shall see), he is not shown as making a stumping in any of the first 34 Royal Artillery matches for which CricketArchive has the details (to 1881 inclusive). His greatest mark, however, was made with the bat. Scores and Biographies described him as ‘a good and free hitter’, and in that style in 1877 and 1878 he made scores of 92, 173, 15 not out and 110 in successive innings against the Artillery’s greatest rivals, the Royal Engineers. He is also reported to have made, at some points in his career, scores of 189 in a match for the RA Non-Commissioned Officers against the North of the Thames Licensed Victuallers Association, and 160 not out in a match for Erith - though I have not been able to track fuller details of these last two innings. One of his last big scores was an innings of 145 in the RA’s second innings against the Cambridge Quidnuncs at Woolwich in July 1882, to go with a score of 45 in his first innings, and two stumpings in the match; S&B records that after the game he was presented with two bats (why two?!) for his fine hitting. Later in the same week he was at it again against the Royal Engineers: when the Artillery went in for their second innings, there were only 50 minutes left for them to score 68 runs for victory. Boys opened, as usual, and by the time the runs were knocked off without loss 27 minutes later, he had scored 46 of them. Kent had meanwhile not forgotten him. Whereas in 1875 he had been in the Kent Colts side against the county eleven, the following year he was playing for the county against the Colts. He opened the batting with George Hearne and scored 13; he also bowled a couple of overs in the Colts’ first innings, and kept wicket (one caught, one stumped) in their second. He missed the Colts fixture for the next four seasons, but in May 65 It is surely only a coincidence that CricketArchive’s ‘player number’ for Boys, 28067, is the same as the number of runs made in his first-class career by Don Bradman! Tragedy