Lives in Cricket No 7 - Richard Daft

opposition was poor. At the dinner for his side held after the Staten Island match, Richard, replying to the toast, observed that the cricket he had met in America had not been up to expectation: ‘If they meant to improve, they must show more patience and play with a straight bat.’ Browne had noted the play of the Twenty-twos at Toronto as ‘a mere procession of batsmen . . . taking careful guard and surveying the weak places in the field, making a grand swipe at what they thought was the ball – then retiring looking foolish.’ Yet, Richard and his side played each match with vigour and never deliberately threw a point away. For more than half the tour there was not much financial reward: then, on 15 October, Richard’s team played eighteen American baseball players at Brooklyn for the benefit of the English team, while the last match – Notts v Yorkshire – was played for the same cause. It was said that 25,000 attended the Brooklyn match, and this made the cricket financially successful for the tourists, while they also engaged in some useful merchandising. Wisden later reported that the tour had ‘a satisfactory balance in hand.’ While commerce was in the minds of several of the tourists, business back in England was probably engaging two of them, Shaw and Shrewsbury. They took the opportunity on tour to finalise their plans to set up a business that would rival Richard’s. In 1880, they launched The Midland Cricket, Lawn Tennis, Football and General Athletic Sports Depot at 85 Carrington Street Bridge, Nottingham. In the 1881 edition of Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack , Richard advertised his business two pages after the end of the editorial section: anyone opening the almanac at the front would find, opposite the title page, an advertisement for Shaw and Shrewsbury’s own warehouse. Their business flourished under the canny and cautious Shrewsbury, who was still only 23 years old, and its early success may be regarded as the nail in the coffin of Richard’s emporium. The touring party returned to Liverpool on 3 November, 1879. There they were entertained at a banquet where the team presented Richard with a gold pencil case, to add to the books and curiosities that had been pressed upon him by admirers in the course of the tour. There was, too, a presentation to Alderman Ford and to Edwin Browne. James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual (‘Red Lilly’), in reporting on the tour, suggested that it had been as successful as any undertaken by English cricketers, adding that ‘Daft’s Twelve did 94 America