Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

member of the Committee of Management, and was then asked to take the chair and presided over a great deal of business. Wisden was re-elected Treasurer. It was a compliment to Richard that he was elected to the post at the age of only 29. He also chaired the Society’s Annual General Meeting on 3 July, 1871, but whether he held office continually from 1865 onwards it is not possible to say. Only by the middle of the century was there a sufficient number of active professionals to make such an organisation feasible. A fortnight later at Trent Bridge, Richard was undefeated for a score of 52 in Notts’ second innings against Surrey. The match terminated with a fine stand between Richard and Tom Bignall, and victory for Notts by eight wickets. In July, at Bradford, his innings of 66 was the only 50 in the game and contributed, along with the bowling of Jackson, Jemmy Shaw and Tinley, to victory over Yorkshire by an innings and 30 runs. This was a controversial fixture as the home side had been raised by a committee in Bradford rather than by the one in Sheffield, where Yorkshire cricket’s power base then lay. Notts were successful by a wide margin, but the event passed off amicably enough. In the next match, in which Surrey were the hosts, George Parr still refused to play at The Oval, so the match may have started in an atmosphere of ill-will: it proved a closely contested game. Surrey, who batted second, had a first-innings lead of 13 and were ultimately set 195 to win. In spite of a grand innings by H.H.Stephenson, who opened the innings and was still batting, with 75 runs to his credit, 14 were still required when the last man, Tom Sewell, went in. He proceeded to hit off the runs required all by himself, but a decision of the umpire in his favour gave the Notts players so much offence – he was run out by a yard-and-a-half, declared William Oscroft – that the Notts players and committee declared that they would not renew the fixture. The year 1866 began with a touch of farce. In January, the press reported George Parr’s continuing hostility to the Surrey club and his refusal to allow any player ‘of whom he has control’ to play at The Oval. It was the opinion of F.S.Ashley-Cooper that this declaration concerned no-one but Parr himself. A month later, Richard appeared in pantomime! The Nottingham Theatre staged Jack and the Beanstalk , and the Notts team appeared on stage in cricket dress, while Miss Clara Denvil, in the character of Jack, delivered a rhyming address about each in turn: 40 County Cricket