Lives in Cricket No 46 - George Raikes

91 Raikes finished second both in the Championship batting averages (253 runs at 36.14) and in the bowling averages (25 wickets at 13.80) and was described as “one of the mainstays of the team” (note 9) . In four successive knocks in mid-season he scored 79 not out, 115 (for the Club & Ground), 123 (against the MCC) and 112, being described as: “consistently brilliant”. Writing in The Sportsman , Major Philip Trevor demanded that Norfolk be ‘promoted’ to become a first-class county and this opinion was restated in the souvenir volume published to celebrate the winning of the Championship. Time Off From The Duke The Duke of Portland allowed Raikes sufficient time off to play in five of Norfolk’s eight matches in 1906 and he continued to skipper the county. Though the year was another good one for the old Oxonian in terms of his personal performances, Norfolk slipped back to mid-table obscurity, due largely to the unavailability of some of the better batsmen. He skippered the first two fixtures, against Hertfordshire and Suffolk and, although he registered a ‘fifty’ in each, both games were lost, the first by a huge margin. He was unavailable for the next three games but reappeared in top form as a bowler: in the three matches he took 29 wickets and played a large part in securing victory in each. Against Oxfordshire his figures were 19-3-63-7 and 15-4-60-3; his victims were mostly top order batsmen and he followed up his bowling by helping the Rev McCormick to add 94 in just 49 minutes as Norfolk won by eight wickets with just nine minutes to spare. Cambridgeshire were rolled over by an innings as Raikes had analyses of 5.2-1-23-4 and 18-2-50-7 and, finally, Oxfordshire also lost the return match by an innings. At first, Oxfordshire fared well as they made 264 in their first innings but then they saw their attack bludgeoned as Norfolk made 423 for seven before declaring; there were runs for skippers Barratt (96) and Raikes (84 - scored in just over two hours), who then bagged five for 52 as Oxfordshire capitulated. Raikes’ final Championship total was 34 victims at just 14.09, with two hauls of ten wickets in a match and he ended with a batting average of 37.88, passing the half-century three times. As in 1905, the parsimonious James Worman took the most wickets at the lowest cost, leaving Raikes in second place in the bowling averages but, of those batsmen who played in three or more matches, the skipper had the highest average (note 10) . If Norfolk’s supporters had known how long it would be before Raikes, still Norfolk’s leading all-rounder by a fair distance, skippered his county again they would have been most disappointed. note 1: It is unclear which of the three parishes in Lakenham hosted Raikes who left no ‘paper trail’ in the archives. note 2: Some volumes of Crockford’s state that Raikes remained in Portsea until 1905 and, presumably, moved directly to Welbeck without a sojourn in Norfolk. This minority view seems unlikely, given that the areas in which he served in 1904-05 are known, that he was able to play some cricket in Norfolk for the first time since he was ordained a priest and, crucially, that there is written evidence in the parish archives that he served as a curate in Great Ellingham. Raikes’ Second Spell for Norfolk: The Minor Counties Championship Won