Lives in Cricket No 51 - Rev ES Carter

57 Chapter four Social cricket: More Gentlemen of Yorkshire games, and other sports This chapter spans many years from Carter’s return to Yorkshire in 1875 until he stopped playing any regular cricket in about 1900. Some of the contents below come from Carter’s conversations in Old Ebor’s book Talks with Old Yorkshire Cricketers . Carter in his lifetime kept a cricketing scrapbook, and within it was an address from another clergyman, name now not known, which was given at a church congress in the early 1870s. That clergyman urged his listeners to participate ‘in harmless healthy amusements, the want of which is a most fertile source of sin and crime’. He told his audience not to refuse to play for a parish eleven: “for so shall he find that the fine hit to leg, which opened the mouths of the rustic spectators on the Saturday, will leave them a little open on the Sunday morning; and that he whom the parson has taught to twist will be the more ready to listen to his dissuasives from tortuous conduct.” This was a simple example of the phrase ‘Muscular Christianity’, of sport aiding religion, in which Carter so clearly believed. After Carter died an anonymous correspondent, calling himself Teviotdale wrote to The Australasian newspaper in July 1923, to describe Carter as clergyman and player and though he did not use the phrase ‘Muscular Christianity’ could well have done so. He wrote: “Carter was an uncommonly good looking man; tall, very upright, rather slim, but when I knew him powerful, and with a well trimmed curly beard, fair moustache, and curling auburn hair. Everyone liked him and he was utterly ‘imparsonish’. You would never have suspected from his voice that he was a clergyman. He was a pretty batsman, and a forceful [one], with excellent style and making full use of his reach. He had one particular charming stroke, pushing, very powerfully and gracefully, a good length ball on his leg stump for three or four,