Lives in Cricket No 51 - Rev ES Carter

Gentlemen of Yorkshire 61 And so to the annual dinner of the Yorkshire Gentlemen that year as reported in The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News of 6 October. Carter in responding to the toast of the Gentlemen said of himself: “He was a very good fellow but had got the cricketing mania. Carlyle had said that in England there were so many millions of people who were mostly fools, hence he was not an exception. When told he was labouring under a delusion, if cricket were a delusion, it was a very harmless one …. It was part of a clergyman’s duty to play cricket, for there was as much discipline in it as in rowing.” The same paper reported in December 1877 of the reformation of another area team – the United North of England eleven, with fixtures planned for 1878; and that Edmund Carter had agreed to play for this new side. However his name does not appear as a player in any of the eight 1878 fixtures for which scorecards are given on the CricketArchive website. Another significant year was 1878. The Gentlemen of Yorkshire had their annual meeting in February, with the Earl Fitzwilliam as President, and Carter elected to the committee. It was at this meeting that the club adopted for themselves the colours of the former Vale of Derwent Club. The membership of the Gentlemen’s Club was reported to be 130 members though how many were playing members is not known. This was the year in which Carter played six of his 14 first- class games so he may not have had quite the same amount of time available for Gentlemen’s cricket. But having come back from playing for Yorkshire against the Australians during July, he took part in a two-day game for the Gentlemen against Nottinghamshire amateurs, scored 93 out of 241, and then took eight Nottinghamshire first innings wickets, they being bowled out for 111. In August he was down at Cheltenham to captain Yorkshire in their match against Gloucestershire (see Chapter five on his first-class matches). This match was the second game of Gloucestershire’s very first Cheltenham festival – the first