Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

at Boston, Lincolnshire, and for Irnham Park near Bourne, against such distinguished opponents as the Old Harrovians. Later, as a parent, he showed that he appreciated the advantages of a private education by sending his sons to Trent College, the public school at Long Eaton in Derbyshire, just over the Nottinghamshire border. In 1879, when he led a side of professional cricketers on tour in Canada, the Governor-General, the Marquess of Lorne, and his wife, Queen Victoria’s daughter, Princess Louise, were happy to engage in conversation with him. Lord Harris, fifteen years his junior, refers to his most superior way of speech. Jimmy Catton, a well-known journalist for over fifty years, who knew Richard from the 1880s, says that he was called ‘Dapper Richard Daft’ but adds that ‘Daft was quite a polished man of the world. Nature designed him for a country gentleman, for he had the tastes, the inclinations, the manners and the mode of speech of one who had received some education.’ Elsewhere, he was described as ‘lordly’. Only Daft among professionals would have asked Lord Harris, fielding at point, to desist from sledging while he, Daft, was batting. In addition to his apprenticeship we can look to his mother and her family as an important influence. The little we know about them is based mainly on the career of her brother, Thomas Wood. His day job was that of a commercial traveller, operating on a big scale, from bases in Huddersfield, where he lived, and Nottingham, though his travels also took him to Scotland on behalf of his employers, woollen and worsted manufacturers. He also had a profitable sideline as investor in a big way in stocks and shares. He must have been a man of judgement to have accumulated wealth and to have kept it during the decline in share values in the early 1850s, which followed the exaggerated period of railway mania. 12 Nottingham, Queen of the Midlands