Lives in Cricket No 51 - Rev ES Carter

Chapter six Edmund Peate, Lord Hawke and then the Yorkshire Committee Every writer of a full Yorkshire County Cricket Club history refers to the Rev E.S.Carter in grateful terms for one action, by which he has now become best known – that is the introduction of the then Honourable Martin Bladen Hawke, later Lord Hawke, into the county side. Those writers, the Reverend R.S.Holmes, A.W.Pullin (‘Old Ebor’), J.M.Kilburn, Derek Hodgson, Tony Woodhouse, and David Warner are unequivocal that it was Carter who was responsible for the bringing of Hawke into the full blast of Yorkshire cricket.Another man, too, a great slow left-arm spinner, Edmund Peate, owed his start in Yorkshire cricket to Carter. The teams that Carter helped choose for Scarborough Festival sides had much to do with his willingness to give youth a chance, and with his wide knowledge of up and coming players (especially amateurs) whom he came across over his many years with the Gentlemen of Yorkshire. The two men Peate and Hawke from very different backgrounds were always glad to acknowledge the role that their initial mentor gave to their lives and they much appreciated their good fortune. Edmund Peate Edmund Peate, eleven years younger than Carter, was born in 1856. From a modest background, he took up, as a teenager, the urge to be a fast bowler and he was soon to be playing for the Yeadon Club. To earn some sort of a living he joined in 1875 a strange commercial outfit called Treloars Cricket Clowns, a touring group of eight acrobats, eight talking clowns and eight cricketers. A lot of drinking by spectators and participants was a feature of the entertainment provided by this group. It was hardly winter work and in those dark months of the mid to late 1870s Peate practised in a shed of a Yeadon factory where he also had some employment as a warp-twister. The late Peter Thomas who 84