Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

ended quietly in divorce; and that too was a source of shame in the earlier years of the twentieth century. So my father may have regarded these as skeletons in the family’s cupboard, whose bones he did not wish to shake. Yet for all the disappointments of the latter part of his life, it was clear that my great-grandfather was a fine man. Despite growing up in very poor circumstances, he had a natural dignity and sufficient presence to be able to carry himself well on public occasions. He had a taste, and a prodigious talent, for a wide range of manly games and he seems to have played them honourably – indeed, more scrupulously than the man who came to overshadow him in the Victorian history of English cricket, W.G.Grace. In 2007, the local History Society in Richard’s home of Radcliffe-on-Trent, raised funds for the restoration of his grave in the local churchyard and, with my two cousins who are also Daft’s great-grandchildren, I attended the re-dedication. As I stood before Richard Daft’s grave, a cricket ball’s throw one side from the Manor House where he lodged with his future father-in-law, Butler Parr, on the other side from the brewery which he managed and the house in which he passed his married life, I had a strong sense of the man. I felt that I had been right, as a star-struck teenager, to be proud that he was my ancestor; and, as I have read Neil Jenkinson’s account of him, which brings to life so vividly his story in the context of the other great Victorian cricketers with whom he played and whose names have become household words in cricket history, I feel it even more strongly. I am glad that Richard Daft’s story has been written and I hope that other readers will enjoy it as much as I have done. 8