Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

Chapter One Nottingham, Queen of the Midlands Geographical characteristics set Nottingham apart from its Midland neighbours. Twin peaks lying a mile west of the River Trent stand out above the flood plain. On one stands Nottingham Castle and on the other is the wonderful perpendicular building of St. Mary’s, the mother church of the city. The lower-lying terrain between them was built upon long ago. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the town was a dirty and dangerous place. Noisy, smelly courtyards provided a pump and a midden, often conveniently placed adjacent to each other, to serve dozens of families. Human and animal effluent – the enormous cattle market remained bang in the town centre – was collected in carts and dumped near the River Trent, where it was used as fertiliser for the market gardens which lay near its banks. Cholera was an ever-present threat. The worst conditions were to improve after the mid-nineteenth century, but this was the town into which Richard Daft was born. He was lucky to see the light on the very northern fringe, in North Street, on 2 November, 1835. Richard was the youngest of four surviving sons of John and Sarah Daft: three others had died in infancy. There are indications that Sarah Daft had married beneath her. Her brother, Thomas Wood, died a wealthy man, yet could not put a name to her family when he made his will, which suggests a prolonged estrangement between brother and sister. John Daft was not much of a catch as a husband. In the second volume of Richard Daft’s reminiscences, A Cricketer’s Yarns , published in 1926, Richard’s eldest son, Richard Parr Daft, supplied details of the family’s history. John Daft is presented as someone who, if not a hero, was a man of action who ran away and enlisted in the army and served in the cavalry under Wellington in Spain during the time of the Napoleonic war in the early 1800s. The reality is different. The only record in the national archive at Kew of a soldier named John Daft is found among the documents of the 69th Regiment of Foot. He was in the infantry, not the cavalry. John Daft enlisted at Nottingham in 1796 and, after an interval, 9