Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

Harry’s children: ‘Grandpa fromDorothy, Katie, Emma and Willie’. After the funeral, the family were not to be united for long. By the time of the 1901 census, only Mary Daft and Amy, aged 26, were recorded as being at home. Amy’s sister, Mary, at 27, was living at Hornsey, in North London, as companion to a commercial clerk, who was aged 48. Harry, his wife and their daughter Dorothy, who was eight, were living with his mother-in-law at Lorne Grove, Radcliffe. Richard junior was recorded at an hotel in Norfolk Street, off the Strand. He was, at 37, still a bachelor, as he remained. Richard’s grave remained unmarked until, at the end of November 1901, a few friends and admirers did the right thing. The subscribers included Earl Manvers, Lord Harris, Lord Belper and William Gunn. The monumental inscription reads: ‘A lasting tribute to the memory of a cricketer who in his day and generation had no compeer in the attributes of elegance before the stumps.’ The monument was refurbished in November, 2007 after funds were raised to restore it. Mary survived Richard for nearly twenty years, dying aged 76 on 2 November, 1918. Her end may have been hastened by tragic events in the family of her brother-in-law Charles Daft, who had been the last of the brothers to die in March, 1915 in his eighty-fifth year. He was spared the knowledge of the passing in quick succession of his daughter-in-law, his son and grandson, both also named Charles Frederick. First, the wife of Charles Daft the younger died. He had for many years travelled to Ireland on behalf of a firm of lace manufacturers in Nottingham, and after her death he took his elder son to Ireland for a short holiday. They set out on their return journey on 10 October, 1918. The mail packet in which they were sailing, R.M.S.Leinster , was torpedoed by a German U-boat, with the loss of 480 lives. The news soon reached a young sailor, the last remaining member of the family, who had just come home on leave from the war. In her will, dated 8 May, 1911, Mary left the residue of her estate between four of her children, to the exclusion of Harry. By 1911, he was a cricket coach at Oxford, many of whose first-class matches he umpired. Perhaps he had left wife and children behind at Radcliffe? Ann was now Mrs. Butler, while Amy had wed George Bell, who was the landlord of the Manvers Arms, as well as farming and running a nursery at Radcliffe. 134 Post Mortem