Lives in Cricket No 51 - Rev ES Carter

race and winning all of them. He was the first person to achieve that notable ranking. Probably Carter could have obtained a hat-trick of Blues if he had been fit for the 1869 contest, but the pleurisy which he contracted in the summer of 1868 put an end to further rowing ambition. He was however a double rowing and cricketing Blue. Of his Victorian predecessors in the Oxford boat or Varsity cricket team only Charles Wordsworth, G.E.Hughes, Joseph William Chitty, G. Bennett, C.G.Lane, J.Aitken, and S.O.B. Ridsdale had achieved that success. Of the eight double Blues, four became clergymen – Wordsworth, Lane, Aitken and Carter. Charles Wordsworth was a considerable man, and having played in the first University cricket match against Cambridge, then instigated the annual boat race which commenced in 1829. He later became Second Master at Winchester and then Bishop of St Andrews. The Rev Charlton Lane played 18 times for Surrey and was born in the parsonage at Kennington. Chitty having rowed several times in the Boat Race (including 1849 when there were two boat races in March and December) later umpired it for many years, became in time Member of Parliament for Oxford and soon after a High Court judge, and then a judge of the Court of Appeal. When Edmund Carter joined their ranks he became the last Oxford man from the 19th century to gain that plainly extraordinary double Blue. There were also eight Cambridge double Blues in the same sports before 1900. More than 30 years later, in June 1900, Carter returned to Worcester College to captain past players for the College in a match against their current players to celebrate the opening of a new College cricket ground that had cost some £2000 to lay out. At the age of 55 Carter scored 31 out of 167 and took six wickets in a one innings game. The Oxford Journal described him as the ‘only double blue who has rowed in two winning boats and also played in a winning eleven’. Pleurisy, then Australia and the Victorian side of 1869 Pleurisy and the financial means to travel gave Edmund Carter the Family 21