Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

Cambridge was minimal. Lang refers, nevertheless, to players in those matches whose memories are fragrant and immortal. On this peg he hangs his evocation: There is no talk, none so witty and brilliant that is so good as cricket talk, when memory sharpens memory and the dead live again, the regretted, the unforgotten, and the old happy days of burned out Junes revive. We shall not see them again. We lament that lost lightness of heart, ‘for no man under the sun lives twice, outliving his day . . . ’ Cricket is simply the most catholic and diffused, the most innocent, kindly, and manly of popular pleasures, while it has been the delight of statesmen and the relaxation of learning. There was an old Covenanting minister of the straitest sect, who had so high an opinion of curling that he said if he were to die in the afternoon, he could imagine no better way than curling of passing the morning. Surely we may say as much for cricket. Heaven (as the bishop said of the strawberry) might doubtless have devised a better diversion, but as certainly no better has been invented than that which grew up on the village greens of England. Then we move into the company of that man who is happy with the world and his place in it. Richard Daft begins: ‘I was born at Nottingham on 2 November, 1835 and began to play cricket at a very early age.’ Thus, he disposes of antecedents and childhood. The narrative moves into a succession of anecdotes about Old Clarke, and we are out into mid-stream as memories of Fuller Pilch, Alfred Mynn and other great players of Daft’s young days hove into view. Many of the incidents and stories about the All England Eleven have been plundered by cricket historians. About William Clarke: Clarke played until he was quite an old man; and as he had only one eye (the sight of the other having been destroyed at fives), George Parr used to say that in his latter days he played not by sight but by sound. The old man was very queer-tempered in these days, too (as I have since found to be the case with most of us cricketers as we grow older), and was consequently a considerable trial to the patience of many of the younger members of his elevens. Clarke always put a stop to all ‘bragging’ on the part of young players with whom he came in contact. One of his sayings, which speaks volumes, I often quote at the present time: 122 Kings of Cricket