Lives in Cricket No 51 - Rev ES Carter

Gentlemen of Yorkshire 67 his good friend Gerald Arthur Buxton Leatham who also played a dozen games for Yorkshire. When Leatham married in 1890, it was Carter who performed the marriage ceremony with Lord Hawke as best man – Martin Hawke having succeeded to his father’s title in 1887. In 1891 in Carter’s only reported match that year, for Yorkshire Gentlemen versus Old Scardeburgians he batted number 11 for the gentlemen and scored nought, and the report then states that the opposition ‘fell rapidly to the lobs of the Rev E S Carter’. He took five first innings wickets by those lobs, but was keeping wicket in the second innings for he made a stumping and may not have bowled at all. Carter had a resurgence of play for the Gentlemen in 1893. The team had 45 games of which 23 were won. Carter had nine innings, for 197 runs, with a highest score of 51 not out against St John’s College and an average of 28.14 (placing him second in the club averages). He was also second in the bowling averages with 18 wickets at 16.5. Pleasingly for him his sons Edmund Sardinson Dashwood Carter and William Carter sometimes played alongside him. The clergyman element of his life may also have come into play in 1893. According to the York Herald he played in a two- day match against Mystics on Friday and Saturday, 18 and 19 August, in which he scored 25 not out and 30. On the Friday the Gentlemen’s Second Eleven were playing on the nearby ground of the York Club in Bootham Crescent and the Reverend Carter is shown in the paper as having scored six. On the Saturday the paper records that ‘the Reverend E S Carter was compelled to leave when his score stood at 21’ and he resumed play several wickets later and scored another nine. Did he have to rush off to St Michael-le-Belfrey to conduct a wedding? Whatever the position he was clearly having a hectic couple of days. In the 1895 season he had just three innings for the Gentlemen who had a strong fixture list of 42 matches. By now his friend the Reverend E.B.Firth was appearing regularly for the Gentlemen. Other players of significance who now also appeared for the Gentlemen included Lord Hawke, Frank Mitchell and Frank Milligan – supported on occasion by two of Carter’s sons and his