The 1890s were a golden period for “express” fast bowlers, even if a modern critic might justifiably raise an eyebrow at how fast they actually were. Some names became legends, though they have long since faded: Tom Richardson, Charles Kortright, Ernest Jones.

Then there was Arthur Mold, a fast bowler who carried Lancashire’s attack and took vast numbers of wickets. His name often brings recognition, a sense of nagging familiarity. Yet Mold is not remembered for his pace nor his statistical achievements: he was the man repeatedly no-balled for throwing, the man who “chucked”.

For the people who pursued him — and others with supposedly illegal bowling actions — he became the prize, the trophy on the wall. The symbol that cricket had been purified.

As a result, Mold’s entire life and career has been reduced to the idea that he was a disgraced “chucker”. But he was considerably more than that.

Arthur Mold came from the English village of Middleton Cheney, on the border of Northamptonshire and Oxfordshire. He became one of the faceless legions of professionals who played county cricket: expected to know their place and keep to it. Yet just a hint of the man peeks through.

Mold’s father, a thatcher by trade, died in 1878, when Mold was just fifteen. By his own later account in a 1900 interview, he was left to support his invalid mother and decided that, with no trade to fall back on, his best chance of success was professional cricket. At the time, it was a sport that offered opportunities. And Mold was unusually good. He played with great success as a fast bowler for the village cricket team and he was soon in great demand among neighbouring teams for big matches. Some of them doubtless paid him for his services.

However, Mold was not being entirely truthful in his interview. He was not his mother’s only means of support, because his sister and her husband also lived with her. Nor was she the reason he turned to professional cricket. His mother died in 1883 and Mold was working as an agricultural labourer at the time. He did not turn seriously to professional sport until he joined Banbury Cricket Club in 1885.

There was a likelier reason that he might have needed to increase his income in this period. Around 1886, he almost certainly had an illegitimate daughter. As she was seemingly adopted, the identity of her mother is uncertain but the daughter recalled being taken to see Mold play cricket in Manchester several times. She went into the Lancashire dressing room and his team-mates knew about her. She also visited him in later years. Although the circumstances of her birth are lost to history, it might explain why Mold later insisted that he was forced into cricket to support a mother who was already dead.

Another oddity hints at depths unrecorded by the cricket scorecard. Mold was born and baptised simply as Arthur. In later years, by the time he became famous, he added “Webb” — his father’s middle name and his paternal grandmother’s maiden name — to become Arthur Webb Mold. A tribute to his late father perhaps?

Mold gradually and inevitably climbed the cricketing tree. Good performances for Banbury drew wider attention and he was spotted by Lancashire. Attached to the Manchester Cricket Club in 1887, Mold began the process of qualifying for the county. In the meantime, he played for Northamptonshire (not yet a first-class county) and established himself as one of the best fast bowlers in England. However, one man tried to taint these early achievements after Mold’s death.

No-one pursued illegal bowling actions, and Mold in particular, with greater determination than the Wisden editor Sydney Pardon. He lived long enough to write a critical obituary in 1921, in which he reported the words of a batter who supposedly faced Mold in his Northamptonshire days: “If he is fair he is the best bowler in England, but I think he is a worse thrower than ever Crossland was.” Crossland was a Lancashire bowler notorious in the mid-1880s for his dubious action. Yet this condemnation was not repeated elsewhere.

Even if Pardon did not simply invent the quote to make a point, the view was not widely held. For example, an 1889 profile of Mold in Cricket described his emergence: “For a bowler of his speed he has indeed no superior. With a very easy action he does not seem to be so fast as he is, but he comes along at a rare pace.”

Not even a hint of suspicion.

Mold finally qualified for Lancashire in 1889 and played county cricket for the next 12 years.

There were hundreds of wickets, regular appearances in the prestigious Gentlemen v Players match, and a citation as a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1892. He played three Tests for England in 1893 and won a County Championship title in 1897. He and Johnny Briggs did almost all of Lancashire’s bowling: between 1893 and 1895, Mold bowled the equivalent of over 1,000 six-ball overs each season, and that figure exceeded 1,300 in the latter season. In four seasons between 1893 and 1896, he took 736 wickets.

And whatever was said about Mold later, he was recognised as one of the best bowlers in England for most of the decade. Maybe he should have played more for England, although Tom Richardson was more highly regarded. Or perhaps there were just a few sideways glances at Mold’s bowling action. Perhaps.

Mold’s workload fell towards the end of the decade as injuries and seasons of hard graft caught up with him. Even so, his employers and Lancashire’s supporters remained appreciative: his benefit match in 1900 returned an enormous £2,050, one of the highest amounts raised for any professional before the First World War.

By 1900, his career was starting to wind down. He was 37 and reaching a point where his speed was reduced, although he could have played on for several more seasons at a more sedate pace. But he never had the chance.

Instead — depending on your viewpoint — he either finally faced justice for years of unfair bowling, or became the victim of a witch-hunt. Both sides of the argument had vocal advocates and in reality there was no consensus on whether Mold actually threw. Yet one side had the loudest voices.

Concern grew in England throughout the 1890s about the “throwing question”: illegal bowling actions. Many of the complaints were recorded retrospectively, but the Wisden editor Sydney Pardon wrote an article about the issue in the 1895 edition of the Almanack, in which he named Mold as one of the prime suspects.

Many fast bowlers came under suspicion — including Richardson, Kortright and Jones — not least because no-one was entirely sure of the definition of a throw. The Laws of Cricket were vague. Yet the crusaders against throwing insisted that it was obvious; you can just tell, can’t you?

Other factors bubbled away in the background, such as suspicions that no-one could bowl fast without throwing (Mold’s occasional faster delivery was the one questioned most often), and confusion about the use of the wrist in delivering the ball, still a grey area for many critics at the time.

Pardon certainly had Mold in his sights. Some wondered, not without reason, if prejudice against northern professionals played a part. And when a semi-officially sanctioned crackdown began, led by the umpire Jim Phillips, Mold came under much wider scrutiny. Phillips, like Pardon, was convinced that Mold threw.

By June 1900, there had been two-and-a-half seasons of umpires no-balling bowlers for throwing. Mold had not been one of them.

When Lancashire played Nottinghamshire, Phillips was umpire and — to Pardon’s unconcealed delight in his summary of the season in Wisden — no-balled Mold twice for throwing and he was withdrawn from the attack. But Mold continued to play before other umpires for the rest of the season without censure. Arguments raged and Mold had more than his share of defenders, not least from Lancashire officials outraged that their integrity was being questioned by implication. How dare Phillips suggest that they would use an unfair bowler?

Clearly something needed to be done, and at the end of the season, the county captains produced a list of bowlers they considered to have suspicious actions, including Mold. It was an abomination of a list, containing several men who rarely bowled or had not done so for some time, and some names produced a baffled response from the press.

The entire meeting and its conclusions were dogged by controversy and questions over legitimacy. The MCC ultimately refused to back the list, and the matter rumbled on unresolved.

Lancashire continued to publicly defend Mold, as did other more neutral parties. At the start of the 1901 season, he was scrutinised carefully by several of the leading umpires, who saw no issues. However, he dropped out of the Lancashire team for a time because of injury and was therefore absent when Phillips umpired some of Lancashire’s matches.

When Mold returned, Phillips was determined to act decisively.

Everyone expected trouble when Phillips was named as umpire for Lancashire’s match against Somerset at Old Trafford on 11 July 1901.

After Mold’s third over, Phillips began to no-ball him. Unlike in the previous match, Lancashire did not remove Mold from the attack. In his subsequent nine overs Phillips (from both square leg and from behind the bowler when Mold switched ends) no-balled him between sixteen and eighteen times. After that, Phillips stopped, satisfied that the point had been made.

The reverberations continued for days. A camera company, Mitchell and Kenyon, arrived the next day and filmed a clearly unenthusiastic Mold trundling in at slow-medium in the nets, bowling at a delighted A. N. Hornby, Lancashire’s former captain. The press exploded; articles and letters were written both condemning and defending Mold. Many were critical of Phillips’ defiance of other umpires who had thought Mold bowled fairly, and suspected that he enjoyed the limelight a little too much. There was even an undignified back-and-forth in the press between Mold and Phillips, in which both men strongly defended their position.

Even so, there was only one outcome after such a public disgrace. Mold barely played for the rest of the season and declined a new contract. His career was over. Pardon and Phillips had their man, over the protestations of many (including other first-class umpires).

The “authorised” version of cricket history vindicated Phillips, and he was undoubtedly on the winning side. He was viewed as a reforming umpire who stamped out throwing. None were more supportive than the fanatical Pardon, who wrote gleefully of how “we shall soon be entirely free from the evil” of throwing. It was not the only time that he lapsed (presumably unconsciously) into biblical language when discussing the issue.

The quieter, dissenting voices were lost to history, lacking the weight of Wisden. So too was the idea that Mold had ever been anything other than a “chucker”. His considerable playing achievements were forgotten. And all evidence of the man himself evaporated, although he was not alone in that fate as a professional cricketer from the period.

Perhaps the only consolation — and to be charitable, maybe Phillips considered this in not acting before 1900 — was that Mold had his benefit money and had enjoyed a long career. He had not lost out too much financially. But his reputation? That is less quantifiable.

Mold retired, returned to Middleton Cheney and married, becoming the landlord of the Dolphin Inn, where he lived with his wife and two children (and was sometimes visited by his other daughter). He remained as popular as he had been during his playing days until his death from liver cancer in 1921.

Even then, Pardon could not forget. He wrote a condemnatory obituary in Wisden which concluded: “He did wonders for Lancashire, but personally I always thought he was in a false position.” An obituary in The Times — almost certainly also written by Pardon — went even further: “He was a deadly fast bowler, but, all through his career, even his best feats in the cricket field were spoken of with something of apology.”

At the very end, Pardon still reduced Mold to an issue, not a person. Many historians have done the same ever since. But there was far more to Mold than the straightness — or otherwise — of his elbow.

For a fuller retelling of the “Throwing Question”, see the series beginning here.

If Bev Lyon had possessed a touch more batting ability, he would certainly have captained England. He fitted the role to perfection: wealthy father, privileged background, educated at Rugby School, cricket for Oxford University. There were many such amateurs in the 1920s but few had Lyon’s impact on the field.

His leadership transformed an inconsistent Gloucestershire team into regular contenders for the County Championship. An inspirational figure, he knew what drove his players. Off the field, he mingled with the Bristol elite, but on it he motivated a team of gnarly old professionals despite their misgivings about the amateur classes. The aspirational Wally Hammond; the socialist Charlie Parker; the snobbish Charlie Barnett (who, although he was a professional cricketer, hunted with the Beaufort and the Berkeley Vale); the billiard-loving Alf Dipper: all of them looked up to Lyon.

From the time of his appointment in 1929 at the age of 27, until his resignation five years later, Lyon was probably the best captain in England. He led from the front with brilliant fielding and cunning strategies. His only serious tactical rival was Surrey’s Percy Fender who, like Lyon, was happy to take chances and to embrace unorthodoxy. Both men were assumed to be Jewish; there is no evidence that either had any such ancestry. In an age of casual antisemitism, it was enough that both were intelligent and unconventional.

They had another common experience. Both were overlooked for the England captaincy. Fender was too willing to rattle establishment cages on the field; Lyon was something of an iconoclast off it, brimming with cricketing theories and ways to popularise the sport. But unlike Fender, Lyon never even played for England. His batting was never quite good enough. He had the public-school polish required of the best amateurs, a pretty drive, and a first-class batting average below 25.

Had he emerged a few years earlier, he might still have been given a chance to lead the Test side. But by the late 1920s, the England selectors had belatedly realised their captain had to do more than give eloquent speeches if the team was to be competitive. Lyon’s best seasons with the bat — coincidentally his first two years as Gloucestershire captain — pushed him into the frame. Even so, he would have been too big a risk, even when Percy Chapman was sacked during the 1930 Ashes. Instead, Lyon had to be content with captaining Gloucestershire to a famous tie against the Australian team that summer.

Amateurs like Lyon were a dying breed. Few men were independently wealthy enough to spare the time to play regularly. For Lyon too, cricket eventually had to yield to economic necessity.

His father was wealthy, influential and had a messy personal life. He was able to fund Lyon’s education and early cricket, but no more. After that, Lyon established himself in business and made a great success of it.

But in both business and sport, he lived somewhat in the shadow of his older brother, “Dar” Lyon, a wicket-keeping barrister who was at one time on the fringes of the England team. Their father had ensured that the two brothers attended different universities and represented different counties, possibly to temper sibling rivalry. But matches between Dar’s Somerset team and Bev’s Gloucestershire team could be frigid affairs. Both men preached positive cricket, but neither took many chances when facing the other. In 1930, Bev adopted uncharacteristically dour tactics to outmanoeuvre Somerset after Dar made a brilliant century. Gloucestershire ground out a win that the furious Dar branded “disgraceful”.

By the time Bev was appointed as Gloucestershire’s captain, his brother’s cricket career had taken a back seat. After an abortive attempt to become an MP, Dar worked overseas in a succession of British colonies. That was when his younger brother came into his own. Building his Gloucestershire team around the superb batting of Walter Hammond and the spin pair of Charlie Parker and Tom Goddard, and assisted by pitches in Bristol that always offered turn, Bev Lyon made Gloucestershire one of the best teams in England. His astute tactics and willingness to gamble in order to win took the team to the verge of the County Championship. He had strong ideas and inspired his team to carry them out.

Gloucestershire also played exciting cricket because Lyon was a keen advocate of cricket as entertainment. He believed that dull play drove away spectators and was outspoken in his support for some shockingly novel ideas such as one-day matches, a knockout competition and cricket on Sundays. But he made sure that his Gloucestershire team were always attractive to watch, and he became an evangelist for “brighter cricket”. Few followed his example, and similar calls were still being made to little effect thirty years later.

The establishment sometimes looked askance at Lyon’s unorthodoxy, particularly when he was critical of the system. But everyone conceded that Lyon had a point when Gloucestershire finished second in 1930, with fourteen wins. They were beaten by Lancashire, who won just ten matches yet finished three points ahead through their manipulation of the system which awarded bonus points for achieving a first-innings lead in a drawn game.

Partly for this reason, the number of points available for a win increased dramatically for 1931, but this led to perhaps the most notorious incident of Lyon’s career. When Gloucestershire played Yorkshire at Sheffield that summer, in a match expected to have a strong bearing on the Championship, the first two days were rained off. With just one day remaining, it seemed the best either team could hope for was 5 points for a first-innings lead in an inevitable draw. But Lyon had spotted a loophole which would allow the teams to play for the full 15 points.

He and the Yorkshire captain Frank Greenwood agreed to declare their respective first innings closed after just one delivery, and play out the rest of the match as a single-innings affair. Gloucestershire won the resulting contest, taking 15 points, but such contrivance caused enormous controversy and, in some quarters, outright fury. Such things were “undignified and fantastic” according to the Times; correspondents to the Athletic News dismissed the declarations as a “farce” and a “joke”.

Other, less enterprising, captains followed suit in similar matches, and the loophole was closed for the following season. But the storm did not bring the Championship. At the end of the season, Gloucestershire again finished second, some distance behind Yorkshire despite that victory.

Lyon’s business interests — after being a director of a company that sold radios and loudspeakers, he co-founded a business that relayed radio transmissions — took up more of his attention over the following years. He resigned as Gloucestershire captain in 1934 when he felt he could no longer spare enough time. He never won the Championship but left many happy memories and a glowing legacy.

His success in cricket brought Lyon wider fame, but that could be double-edged. He was well-known for what was euphemistically described as his “eye for the ladies”. The Gloucestershire team turned a generally amused blind eye to his string of girlfriends and affairs, but his relationships were sometimes serious, and he married three times. One of his divorces appeared all over the newspapers in 1931, much to his embarrassment.

Bev Lyon died in 1970; he bequeathed over £20,000 in his will, but expressly forbade a funeral. Instead, he donated his body to the Royal College of Surgeons. Even at the end, he refused to be bound by convention.

His Wisden obituary simply called him “one of the most astute captains of his era”. Accurate enough, but the phrase does not quite capture the restless energy of a man who tried to wrestle English cricket out of its lethargy.

For a more detailed biography of Lyon, see here.

In truth, Bernard Bosanquet was not the greatest of cricketers. As a batter, he had forsaken the Eton polish that should have been imparted during his privileged schooldays. Instead of driving stylishly, he was cramped and awkward with a preference for the leg-side. Balls moving at pace troubled him but he was effective when in form. Yet nothing about his batting or fielding stood out. He would have been completely forgotten had he not discovered something that revolutionised — some said ruined — cricket.

At some time in the 1890s, Bosanquet developed a delivery that looked like a leg-break but acted like an off-break. Today such a delivery is known as a googly, a term that stuck very quickly but which originally just signalled an unusual or unexpected ball. The origin of the googly has become shrouded in myth and mystery but the version most often told — which came from Bosanquet’s own account — is that he discovered the method playing a game that involved bouncing a rubber ball across a billiard table.

Such a tale, even if not wholly accurate, fits Bosanquet perfectly. He came from a distinguished family, known for philosophy, science and politics rather than cricket (although a distant cousin called Walter Bosanquet had been involved with the world’s first professional women’s cricket team in 1890). Throughout his life, he enjoyed socialising and his natural habitat was country house parties in the company of the rich. The sort of setting in which idle young men bounce balls lazily at their friends on rainy afternoons.

And such a tale suited cricket’s story-tellers: the most revolutionary delivery being devised by one of the game’s amateur sons as an amusing leisure activity rather than through cunning calculation and experimentation in the nets.

The reality might have been less romantic; several differing accounts involving numerous types of ball and surfaces were passed down. Some featured family games of cricket improvised with rubber balls and broomsticks. All of them involve a degree of hard practice not quite suitable for amateur cricketers, which might be why Bosanquet — and storytellers — played down this aspect.

At first, according to Bosanquet, his discovery remained something of a party trick, even after he progressed to bowling it with a cricket ball: something to be displayed as a gimmick in the nets but not taken seriously.

But there were two other factors at play. The first was that cricketers had long been aware that it was possible to bowl a ball that broke the “wrong” way by accident. Some bowlers known for occasionally doing so played for Middlesex and for Oxford University, where Bosanquet studied in the 1890s.

Another issue was the increasing dominance of bat over ball. During the 1890s, scores and batting averages inflated rapidly as both pitch curation and batting technique became more advanced. Any trick that could redress that balance was eagerly seized upon. Related to that was a renewed interest in old-fashioned leg-breaks delivered via wrist-spin; this renaissance was underway even before the googly was discovered. Perhaps this influenced Bosanquet too as he transformed himself from an ineffective medium-paced bowler to a temporary world-beater.

With the scene set, Bosanquet tentatively introduced the googly to first-class cricket. Initially, he laughed off any success as an accident, a fluke, an unintentional variation; his Middlesex team-mates knew about the googly but attempted to keep it quiet so that it could surprise unsuspecting opponents. But rumours gradually emerged that Bosanquet was doing something extraordinary, and even featured in the 1902 Wisden.

By the 1903 season, Bosanquet was taking enough wickets to be considered an all-rounder. Even so, his selection for the England side that toured Australia in 1903–04 raised a few eyebrows and more than one critic accused the captain Pelham Warner of favouring cricketers from Middlesex. Warner, however, had spotted the match-winning potential of the googly.

In the decisive fourth Test, with the series standing 2–1 to England but with Australia in a good position to win the game, Bosanquet bowled out the home team with a spell of six for 51. The googly had delivered. And in the 1905 Ashes, it delivered once again as Bosanquet took eight for 107 to almost single-handedly win the first Test.

But this was less the case of a star emerging on the world stage and more of the spotlight briefly and unexpectedly shining on a bewildered extra. Bosanquet might have discovered the googly, but he never mastered it. On his day, he could bowl fairly accurately and against batters who had never seen googlies before, he could be deadly. But even on those good days, he sent down some “filth”.

And when it was not a good day, his slow and flighty bowling could be embarrassing. He told the story against himself of the first victim of the googly in first-class cricket: Samuel Coe of Leicestershire was stumped from a delivery that bounced four times. It did not help that Bosanquet had only turned to wrist-spin at the same time as he developed the googly. For his new delivery to be effective, he needed an orthodox leg-break and he never quite perfected that.

Therefore, Bosanquet was a mixed bag with the ball; Warner described him as “the ‘worst best bowler’ in the world”. He uncovered the potential of the googly, won two matches for England and several more for Middlesex, then faded away, content with country house cricket and living the high life.

Yet the seed had been sown and it bloomed in unexpected places. Although the secret of how to bowl the googly remained closely guarded, Bosanquet passed it on to a Middlesex team-mate called Reginald Schwarz who emigrated to South Africa soon after. Schwarz passed it on to others which meant that the South African team that visited England in 1907 contained four googly bowlers. Between them, they took 376 first-class wickets during the tour and proved almost unplayable to a succession of bewildered English batters.

It is hard to comprehend the shock and fear invoked. A slightly despairing article in Wisden by R. E. Foster (who had captained England that summer) grumbled that the googly would diminish batting, particularly as it developed further. But Foster was also a very good batter who noted, almost in passing and without any awareness of the technique, that he had spotted a slight difference in wrist position when the googly was bowled.

Some of the shriller critics bleated that cricket had been ruined. Amateurs who possessed beautiful cover drives that enthralled crowds complained bitterly: how could they play their signature shot when the ball might unexpectedly break the other way and bowl them? There were mutterings that it was unfair; its misdirection was perceived as dishonesty. Those with long memories wondered how even W. G. Grace might have coped; Jack Hobbs’s reputation as a great batter initially arose through his success as the first man to conquer the googly.

That such damage should be done to the game by one of its glamorous amateur elite — and one who was otherwise such a non-notable cricketer — is one of the more delicious ironies. Not that Bosanquet enjoyed it.

He wrote a characteristically witty and charming article in 1925, which was reprinted in Wisden, giving the history of his association with the googly. He began: “Poor old googly! It has been subjected to ridicule, abuse, contempt, incredulity, and survived them all.” And he observed, not without accuracy, that the googly had been blamed for everything from diminished batting techniques to the decline in other styles of bowling. But he effectively washed his hands of everything that had happened after he abandoned it in 1906, and played down his role except to say “if I appear too much in the role of the proud parent, I ask forgiveness.”

After the 1907 tour of England, the South African googly phenomenon quickly fizzled out. Instead the delivery took root in Australia, where several bowlers worked out a method to recreate Bosanquet’s success. A dynasty of wrist-spinners began with H. V. Horden, progressing through Arthur Mailey, Clarrie Grimmett and Bill O’Reilly; later members included Richie Benaud and Shane Warne. And in honour of the googly’s discoverer — or inventor, or creator, or whatever term works best — the delivery is still sometimes known in Australia as the “bosie”.

But appropriately for the googly, that particular eponym might not be what it appears. The Australian crowds in 1903–04, as Australian crowds often did, seized upon Bosanquet, and particularly the unusual jumpers he wore. One interpretation suggests that Bosanquet was seen as effeminate, and that “Bosie” was actually a reference to Lord Alfred Douglas (known as “Bosey”) with whom Oscar Wilde had a well-publicised affair. The same line of thinking links the other Australian name for the google — the “wrong ‘un” — with the derogatory term used to describe gay men at the time.

It is not a particularly robust argument. It might be looking for something that isn’t there, which seems even more appropriate. Possibly Bosanquet would have approved.

The man himself continued to play occasionally until the First World War, before devoting himself full-time to the pursuit of pleasure. His son — the newsreader Reginald Bosanquet — recalled how his father never did a day’s work in his life, but his charm permitted him to be an almost permanent guest at other homes. Bosanquet married late, aged 46, and Reginald was his only child.

The creator of the googly died young, aged only 58, and his family argued for some years about the genesis of his one spectacular cricket achievement. It seemed to matter greatly to some people for a time. Then, like most such things, it was forgotten.

For such a man as Bosanquet, who never took cricket or life too seriously, to have had such an impact is an oddity of the sport’s history. A different character might perhaps have been more dedicated and become a more consistent cricketer through orthodox means. Not Bosanquet. His short-cut to success gave him undying fame but meant that his cricketing life was short and unfulfilled.

For Bosanquet, that was the paradox of the googly.

Note: For more on Bosanquet, this article discusses his discovery of the googly, and this one examines his success.

In the mid-1920s, two former cricketers appeared in court charged with criminal offences within twelve months of each other. Both men had been briefly famous a few years earlier; their return to the headlines was less auspicious. Yet other than their appearance in court, the two men had little in common. Their parallel lives perfectly illustrate the divided nature of English cricket at the time.

In September 1925, Thomas Raikes was fined £2 for possession of a gun without a licence and bound over in a case of fraud in which he had knowingly used a bad cheque for almost £25 (equivalent to almost £2,000 today). In July 1926, Ronald Lowe was bound over for twelve months for stealing money amounting to nearly £9 (worth around £700 now). Raikes, sympathetically handled by the court, sailed away to a new life in South America; Lowe, heavily criticised, had to pick up the pieces unaided.

Although they came from very different backgrounds, Raikes and Lowe would have nodded in rueful recognition at the way the other’s cricket career unfolded. Both were bowlers who began well, even spectacularly, before fading and being discarded.

Yet for Raikes, such a fate could be shrugged off because he was an amateur: middle-class, from a wealthy family and never paid for playing cricket. His livelihood would never have depended on cricketing success. By contrast, Lowe had been a professional since the age of sixteen, a young man from a working-class background who had pinned his hopes on a career with Surrey. Failure for him meant that he had to find another way to earn a living.

As such, their paths to court were very different.

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Thomas Barkley Raikes was the son of a barrister who worked in India, where Raikes was born in 1902. The family returned to England in time for Raikes to attend Winchester College from 1916 until 1921. He excelled at sport and he reached the cricket first eleven by 1919. That was a considerable achievement as his team-mates included the future England captain Douglas Jardine and Claude Ashton, one of the most glamorous figures in public school cricket.

Although he could bat well enough, Raikes’s main skill was as a versatile bowler whose variations of spin, swing and pace were too much for most schoolboys. He was most effective in the big games — against Harrow and Eton — and was chosen for representative schoolboy cricket at Lord’s in 1920 and 1921. In the latter year, he was the Winchester cricket captain. He even played for Norfolk, the county for which his father and uncle had played.

School photographs from the time show a self-confident, maybe even self-satisfied, young man, immaculate in a suit and tie. Like many of his contemporaries in a Britain recovering from the trauma of the First World War, great things were expected of him. He left Winchester in 1921, following Jardine to Oxford. But that is where it all went wrong.

Part of the explanation can be found in life at Winchester in this period. It was simply brutal. Early morning washes in cold water, little food (especially immediately after the war), gruelling lessons in Latin and Greek, obsession with sport and physical achievements, corporal punishment and a lack of privacy. The cornerstones of the time were austerity and duty.

Some boys thrived; Jardine made it the cornerstone of his life and philosophy. It is safe to say that Raikes did not. His life after leaving school could hardly have rejected the Winchester ethos more dismissively.

Raikes’s time at Oxford was perfectly summarised by his Wisden obituary: “He found the pleasure of life at Oxford too alluring”. He began well enough, reaching the University eleven and winning his Oxford “Blue” (awarded to students who represented Oxford against Cambridge) as a freshman in the 1922 team, alongside future Test players Jardine and Greville Stevens. If his figures were unspectacular, he was given glowing write-ups.

But then came the fall. Stories passed down through the family tell of time spent drinking and gambling. He was a man enjoying life thoroughly and perhaps casting off Winchester. Stories also survived of several relationships, of which evidence survives for just one. In 1924, he married a woman from Headington, Oxfordshire, called Cicely Sides, the daughter of a bank manager. The marriage was short-lived; she divorced him in 1926.

His cricketing success was similarly ephemeral. As his weight increased, so did his bowling average. He fell away badly until in 1925, having already been overlooked — to his disappointment — for the captaincy, he was dropped by Oxford. When Raikes left Oxford, his serious cricket career ended. His Wisden obituary simply said: “On going down [from Oxford] he went abroad and played no more serious cricket.” But the truth was more complicated.

Raikes faced mounting financial pressures, and at the end of July 1925, his bank forced him to close his account, which contained only 14 shillings. In early August, he used a cheque for almost £25, which he knew could not be honoured, to hire a car. The vehicle surfaced in Market Harborough, where he abandoned it after an accident, but Raikes did not.

On 28 September, Raikes was arrested as he was about to board a train in Oxford. Charged with attempting to use a fraudulent cheque, he was refused bail and held on remand. He was found to be carrying an automatic pistol, for which he had no licence. Seventeen rounds of ammunition were also found in his lodgings. He never offered an explanation for why he was carrying a gun, but it was certainly an indication that all was not well.

When his case came to court at the London Sessions on 20 October, Raikes was represented by one of the leading barristers in the country, Travers Humphreys. He was fined £2 for possession of the pistol, and his ammunition was confiscated. Regarding the fraud, Raikes admitted trying to use a bad cheque, but at this point his privilege came to his aid. His father, who was still a barrister, offered to pay the company what they were owed; under this agreement, the case was dropped. Raikes was gently, even sympathetically, handled by the court, which expressed disapproval but was happy to offer another chance.

Nevertheless, Raikes was effectively ruined. The story was widely reported in the press. The Daily Mirror even ran the headline “Oxford Blue Guilty”. But part of the deal struck by Raikes’s father was that his son would be sent overseas, a common solution for wealthy families in dealing with sons who were in trouble. And so, in April 1926, Raikes departed England for Buenos Aires, Argentina. He spent the next 26 years working as a sheep farmer. But rather than live out his life quietly, he continued to find trouble, including an unhappy marriage to his first cousin — in which, according to his own family, he was unfaithful — which ended in divorce in the 1950s.

Raikes left Argentina in 1952 and lived quietly in England for the rest of his life. He remarried and worked as an engineer before retiring to Norfolk, where he died in 1984 at the age of 81. Neither his Wisden obituary nor that in the Wykehamist — Winchester College’s long-running magazine — made any mention of the scandal which ended his cricket career. The Wisden obituary ended euphemistically: “He will be remembered as a bowler of great possibilities which he lacked the dedication to develop.”

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Ronald Francis Lowe had a very different background. He was born in Shepherd’s Bush in 1905. His father worked in the paint trade but later became a commercial traveller of questionable morals; his mother’s family had ties to Irish nationalism. Lowe was spotted playing cricket on Mitcham Green by the head of the Oval groundstaff and signed as a professional for Surrey from the 1921 season, when he was still only sixteen.

At the time, Surrey possessed an enviable batting line-up, including Raikes’s Winchester and Oxford contemporary Douglas Jardine, but struggled to bowl out the opposition. Various promising young bowlers were given an opportunity only to fall short. One of these was Lowe, who made his first-class debut early in the 1923 season.

Perhaps fortunately, this was an away game — the Oval pitch was notoriously flat and had defeated many young bowlers — against Glamorgan, the weakest county at the time. Lowe rose to the occasion. His first-innings figures of four for 60 were good, but in the second Lowe was unplayable in helpful conditions. He finished with figures of 14–6–15–5. Surrey’s ten-wicket win owed much to Lowe’s nine wickets in the match.

Such an exceptional beginning by a cricketer still two months short of eighteen prompted great excitement in the press and some unwise comparisons to Wilfred Rhodes. Lowe excelled in the next two games — both played away — but when the team returned to the Oval, he became yet another young bowler chewed up by the flat surface. After failing to make an impression, he was dropped.

While Lowe’s bowling fell away badly, his decline coincided with multiple personal problems. His father had abandoned the family in 1922 and his mother had begun a mental health spiral that resulted in her being institutionalised. Then, just as Lowe was making his way in the Surrey team, he missed one match and was seemingly called away on the final day of another. Immediately afterwards, his unmarried older sister gave birth to a boy, whom she gave away — willingly or not — to adoption.

The fallout of these events must have impacted Lowe’s performance; in any case, he never made it back. Although he remained employed by Surrey until 1925, he rarely even appeared for the second eleven and never returned to the first team, his place blocked by a 28-year-old amateur spinner called Stanley Fenley. Although still only twenty, Lowe’s cricket career was effectively over after Surrey released him. And unlike Raikes, he had no wealthy family to fall back on.

On 15 July 1926, Lowe was acting as the scorer in a game played on Mitcham Green between Mitcham Police and Mitcham Special Constabulary. One of the players had left his wallet in the pavilion where Lowe was keeping score, but returned to discover £8 had gone. Lowe was the only possible suspect. A sergeant was called, and when Lowe was searched, he was found to have the money.

Appearing before the Croydon County Bench the following day, Lowe said that he was working as an engineer and confirmed he was a former professional cricketer. He pleaded guilty, saying he had “yielded to sudden temptation” because he had received an income tax bill that morning. He said that he was single, but “supported his mother”.

At this point in Raikes’s story, his father had ridden in to rescue him; Lowe’s father had long abandoned him and would not have been able to help in any case. Instead, it was the father of the victim who pleaded with the magistrate for leniency because Lowe was “probably not well off”.

The magistrate was none-too-sympathetic, offering laboured cricketing metaphors and indicating that Lowe should have known better. Nevertheless, given his previous good character, Lowe was bound over for twelve months in the sum of £10. As had been the case for Raikes, Lowe’s fall was widely reported. But the latter had no means of escape to a fresh start.

Instead, Lowe had to rebuild his own life. He left the family home around 1928 and trained as a mental health nurse. He worked at Essex and Colchester Mental Hospital, known as Severalls, and later married a fellow nurse. Perhaps he followed that calling because of his mother; by 1939 she was a patient in another mental hospital in Surrey, where she remained a resident until her death in 1963. Lowe himself died in 1960, at the age of 55. He received just a brief word in Wisden, which omitted his fall in 1926.

As in the case of Raikes, his obituarist opted for discretion and forgiveness.

The parallel lives of Raikes and Lowe reveal a lot about English cricket and wider society in the 1920s. Raikes used his privilege to escape problems caused by his own excesses; Lowe battled back from hardship that was never really his fault. It is perhaps not a comfortable comparison.

But anyone familiar with the workings of the British class system before the Second World War might not be too surprised. It was a phenomenon that spread far beyond the cricket field.

Note: If you are interested in other historical writing about the lives of people not involved in cricket, subscribe to my other Substack, Recreating Lost Lives.

Recreating Lost Lives

Finding the people behind the historical headlines

By Giles Wilcock

Few cricketers have fallen so far and so fast as Cecil Parkin, and those who have matched him usually had a reason, whether alcohol, drugs or mental health. Parkin achieved it entirely without assistance: self-sabotage driven by a need for validation.

Before the Fall, Parkin was a good professional cricketer. Born just outside the Yorkshire boundary, in Stockton-on-Tees, he played once for that county before anyone realised he was not qualified. With that avenue closed, he carved out a career in league cricket, and was in great demand in the Lancashire League. When he had qualified for Lancashire, having lived long enough in the county, he took fourteen wickets on debut in 1914 and was catapulted into representative cricket, appearing in Gentlemen v Players matches. After the war, he continued to represent Lancashire but played mainly in the Central Lancashire League. On his occasional appearances at county level, his quality was obvious and he played against the Gentlemen in 1919 and 1920. In fact, he was clearly among the best bowlers in England and when the legendary Sydney Barnes declined an invitation to tour Australia for the 1920–21 Ashes, Parkin was chosen as his replacement.

The similarities between Parkin and Barnes require a pause. Even today, many cricket followers are familiar with Barnes, whose Test record dwarfs almost all others and whose reputation has somehow endured for over a century while his contemporaries have faded from memory. If Parkin is remembered at all — and he usually isn’t — it is because of the Fall. But like Barnes, Parkin made his name in league cricket and spent much of his career outside the first-class game. And as a bowler, Parkin had modelled himself on Barnes to some extent. Both men bowled spin at medium-pace, a skill almost lost to modern cricket as it has been superseded by seam-bowling. On their day, both were unplayable; but Barnes had far more of those days than Parkin.

There were other differences. Where Barnes was metronomic and accurate, Parkin mixed up his bowling: in the stiffened atmosphere of the 1920s, he was seen as experimenting too much, over-reliant on his slower ball. Parkin also smiled more than Barnes. A renowned entertainer of the crowd, he even perfected tricks such as making the ball jump from his foot into his hand when he was fielding.

More importantly, Barnes was a stubborn, self-reliant man who knew his worth and deliberately turned his back on first-class cricket to carve out a career in the leagues where he was paid more for working less; Parkin was drawn to the brighter lights of the first-class game. And he lacked Barnes’ iron will and self-control. Whereas Barnes could walk calmly away if he was unsatisfied, Parkin reacted with fury.

One such incident arose in a Central Lancashire League match for Rochdale in 1920. It began with a rejected lbw appeal and ended with an entire club withdrawing from the league. Parkin, frustrated by what he saw as the umpire’s incompetence, stormed from the field during the game. His refusal to apologise — perhaps driven by local press suggestions that he might have had a point about the lbw decision — escalated to the point that the League Committee suspended him. Rochdale selected him anyway and in a faintly ridiculous dispute withdrew from the league, which insisted that it had already suspended the club.

That Rochdale were willing to go so far might indicate how good Parkin could have been; that such actions were necessary illustrates just as equally how impossible he became. Barnes would have left to find a better deal. Parkin needed to have the final word; he needed to be right and perhaps he even needed validation.

Two months later, a quiet compromise was agreed: Parkin expressed muted “regret” to Rochdale’s mayor and everyone carefully stepped back from the brink. Not that he was especially grateful for Rochdale’s support: the following season, the club suspended him for playing in a Gentlemen v Players match at the Oval without their permission, and when his contract expired at the end of the season, he chose not to renew it.

By then, Parkin was at his peak. He had already played nine Tests for England in 1920 and 1921; although his bowling returns were unremarkable, he was one of the better performers in a weak team. Having fallen out with Rochdale, he spent four seasons playing full-time for Lancashire, with considerable success. In that time, he had what he craved: applause, affection, adoration, the status of a county hero. But his satisfaction was fragile and his need to be right still lurked below the surface. When it erupted again, it brought about the Fall.

England’s next series at home was against South Africa in 1924. Parkin played in the first Test but bowled little as the England captain Arthur Gilligan and the seam bowler Maurice Tate demolished a weak opposition batting line-up in a comfortable win for the home side. Parkin went wicket-less and seems to have taken exception to how Gilligan overlooked him. He ill-advisedly expressed his displeasure at how Gilligan had used his bowling in his column, produced mainly by a ghost-writer, in the Sunday newspaper Empire News.

Under the inflammatory headline “Cecil Parkin Refuses to Play for England Again”, the article laid bare Parkin’s humiliation, the damage to his reputation he believed had been caused by Gilligan’. To complete the self-destruction, the article also directly criticised Gilligan’s captaincy. Parkin later insisted that the ghost-writer had over-reached, but these remarks were certainly in character. Even if it was just a post-match word uttered in fury, he had implied approval. And he had failed to check what appeared in his name.

Parkin received no support from the press (although Gilligan’s reluctance to use him attracted some comment). Instead, there was widespread shock that any cricketer, particularly a professional dependent on the backing of the establishment, would be so indiscreet or would dare to criticise the England captain so openly. The controversy echoed for some time and brought Parkin’s international career to a crashing end.

Parkin penned an apology to Gilligan and the Test authorities, but such attempts at damage limitation were doomed to failure and could not resurrect his international career. Nevertheless Gilligan held no lasting grudge: he even penned a forward to Parkin’s self-serving 1936 autobiography in which he blamed his ghost-writer for the incident. This defence is rather undermined by another unnecessary controversy during the winter of 1924–25, when the England team toured Australia under Gilligan’s captaincy.

Shortly before the third Test, when England were already 2–0 down in the Ashes, Parkin wrote an article for the Weekly Despatch that once again criticised Gilligan and called for his immediate replacement by the professional Jack Hobbs. This went far beyond wounded pride: it was deliberate heresy which attacked the whole system upon which English cricket was built. Leadership was the preserve of the amateur, of the “better” classes. Professionals were considered unsuitable and unworthy for captaincy. If the wider world increasingly challenged such snobbery, cricket was not quite ready for modernity. Even Parkin realised that such an action was unthinkable. As a compromise, he suggested another amateur, Percy Chapman, could take over from Gilligan.

This second piece brought down much more vehement condemnation from the establishment, including words from Yorkshire’s Lord Hawke that entered into infamy: “Pray God that no professional will ever captain England.” And the story travelled, being discussed widely in the press to the point that there was no hiding place. Parkin later lamented how he received abusive letters and criticism from spectators over his words.

The Fall was final, and there was no way back. His benefit match, given to him by Lancashire during the 1925 season, was impacted financially by his ill-judged article. And his on-field success was no compensation for the strife he caused Lancashire. The county quietly let him go in 1926, and he returned to play in the leagues, as well as running hotels and public houses.

Although Parkin maintained a newspaper column for many years, and was keen to opine on matters of the day, he had passed beyond relevance. For a man craving validation, it must have been a cruel blow and might explain why his autobiography included a foreword not just from Gilligan but also from a former Test selector, and why it tried so desperately to set the record straight. Parkin died from throat cancer in 1943, aged just 57, never having managed to do so.

Parkin’s model, Sydney Barnes, never worried about getting his views across or justifying himself. Although he was interviewed fairly regularly in old age, he had kept his counsel during his playing days. If he was unhappy, he took action but never rushed into print or clashed openly. He did not need validation because he knew his own worth; he did not court popularity but only pursued wickets. Anger was a private matter, dealt with out of sight. That was how he was able to turn his back on the establishment and yet still play for England; and why he was a legend long after his retirement.

Had Parkin absorbed those lessons, perhaps his career — and his life — could have been different.

George Macaulay wasn’t keen to switch ends, but he respected the tactical genius of Wilfred Rhodes, so he ultimately agreed.

Playing at Bradford, Yorkshire were facing their first defeat of the 1925 season; Sussex needed 263 to win and just before lunch on the final day were 223 for three. Ted Bowley had already reached his century. The tired attack — featuring four Test bowlers, including Macaulay — had toiled all morning for one wicket.

Macaulay was in the middle of the greatest season of his career, one in which he took over 200 wickets, and enjoying a triumphant comeback after being overlooked for the previous winter’s Ashes series in Australia. His omission had not been based on cricket — he had headed the national bowling averages in 1924 — but on his behaviour.

He had a reputation as a fierce competitor who always had a sharp word for opponents, and equally so for team-mates. But occasionally he crossed a line that was fiercely demarcated in the 1920s: his hostility sometimes spilled into what today would be called sledging but which was frowned upon (especially from professionals) at the time. He was the bitter figurehead of a Yorkshire team that made itself very unpopular with its aggressive antagonism and hard-nosed professionalism; the team won many games but few friends.

Macaulay was a convenient scapegoat, but other changes followed. The ineffectual captain was replaced by another amiable amateur, Arthur Lupton, whose army background brought some discipline to the passionate team. Under his leadership, Macaulay exhibited more control, and thrived. So too the team.

But the strings were pulled by Rhodes, whose vast cricketing knowledge was always appreciated by Macaulay. And he probably admired the hard edge to Rhodes’s play, which contrasted with the softness of the game as played by “gentlemen” amateurs like Lupton, or the Sussex captain Arthur Gilligan.

Ironically, Macaulay’s background — privately educated at the establishment today known as Barnard Castle School and with a promising career in banking that he abandoned in his pursuit of professional cricket — would have made him an ideal amateur at many counties, perhaps enticed by a sinecure administrative position. Not at Yorkshire. And not for Macaulay. He didn’t compromise.

Inevitably, Rhodes’s instincts about the change of ends were sound and Macaulay bowled George Cox to bring about an early lunch. Sussex doubtless enjoyed their refreshments, needing forty runs to win with six wickets in hand. As for Macaulay …

Later stories stated that he drank champagne during the break. At the time, it was viewed as a restorative for fast bowlers. But for Macaulay, maybe it was something else because he had a long and troubled relationship with alcohol. His father, the landlord of a public house in Thirsk, had died at the age of 42 (when Macaulay was eleven), most likely through the effects of alcoholism. A story later told by Percy Fender indicated that when Macaulay toured South Africa with an England team in 1922–23, the amateur Arthur Carr encouraged him to drink heavily. And by the early 1930s, possibly sooner, Macaulay himself was an alcoholic, an illness that cost him his career and eventually his life. If the champagne story is true, was it a tonic? Or drowning sorrows in the face of defeat?

But when the teams came back out, something had changed. Macaulay was simply unplayable. He was never an easy bowler to face, always attacking, never offering a moment’s peace. He swung the new ball at a lively pace, but was more dangerous bowling brisk off-spin with rings of close fielders. Batters were often left guessing by his wide variety of deliveries — dubbed “Macaulay’s Essays” by one literate team-mate — but on that August afternoon, he was on another level.

In 32 deliveries after lunch, he took five wickets for eight runs. He swung the ball both ways and found alarming bounce from the pitch. Sussex were all out for 239; Yorkshire won by 23 runs and remained unbeaten for the remainder of the season. Macaulay had to sprint off the field to escape the ecstatic Yorkshire supporters but was left shattered by the mental and physical effort. Or perhaps by the champagne.

It was the kind of effort that Yorkshire bowlers pulled out; Roy Kilner had achieved something similar against Surrey in 1923. But with Macaulay, this was his entire mode of being. He never gave up.

He showed similar determination off the field. During the First World War, Macaulay had joined the Royal Field Artillery almost immediately after turning eighteen and was involved in fierce fighting on the Western Front. Kilner, Arthur Dolphin and Abe Waddington had fought too; such shared experiences formed a close bond between the three and probably with Macaulay too, although he was more on the periphery of that trio, who called themselves “the Three Musketeers”. However, Macaulay had not made it to the war’s end. In 1917, he had been seriously wounded in the leg and invalided back to England for a long and painful rehabilitation. But by sheer force of will, he recovered to become a cricketer.

Such single-mindedness made him a valuable bowler but could cause problems.

Because aside from his issues with alcohol, Macaulay was “fiercely independent” (as R. C. Robertson-Glasgow described him). His marriage to Edith Hay — one of the nurses who had looked after him during his long recovery from that injury — was unconventional, taking place within months of his release from hospital; neither family apparently approved because neither attended the wedding. Nor were his tastes conventional: a great lover of music — with a beautiful singing voice, a large record collection and a fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan — he often attended musical events at the Queen’s Hall when Yorkshire played in London.

Perhaps this is why he was respected by several surprising figures. When condemning his behaviour in 1924, Pelham Warner conceded that he was a “pleasant fellow” off the field; the journalist Dudley Carew called him a “grand friend” and Robertson-Glasgow wrote that he was “a glorious opponent; a great cricketer; and a companion in a thousand”.

These contradictions baffled his Yorkshire team-mates: Bill Bowes wrote how he never really knew Macaulay despite playing alongside him for years. But Robertson-Glasgow summarised him best: “Witty, argumentative, swift to joy and anger. He had pleasure in cracking a convention or cursing an enemy ... A cricket-bag came between him and his blazer hanging on a peg; and he'd kick it and tell it a truth or two, then laugh.”

But it was not always so amiable. The problems increased as Macaulay’s career went into decline, precipitated by a disastrous performance for England in the Headingley Test of 1926. Questions had already been asked about his effectiveness away from the Yorkshire team, and they were brutally answered when he came under heavy assault from Charlie Macartney, who scored a century before lunch on the first day. Macaulay crumbled and even a match-saving innings of 76 was no compensation. His Test career — which had begun with a wicket first ball against South Africa in 1922–23 — was effectively over.

After this, he was never quite the same player. Cause and effect become blurred, but alcohol certainly played a part. Nothing quite held together. His isolation in the Yorkshire team grew as his fellow war veterans left the stage; first his batting then his bowling fell apart. Plagued by an increasing number of injuries, he lost effectiveness and apparently interest.

It was his benefit match that pushed him over the edge: the practice of awarding professionals the proceeds of one match as a reward for long-service. Macaulay’s was held in 1931 but was fractious from the moment the Yorkshire Committee agreed to it. He never gave up, you see. Endless negotiations over the terms, collections withheld as punishment for his intransigence, a poor financial return, his stubborn refusal to accept Yorkshire’s standard practice of investing two-thirds of the amount on his behalf. Yorkshire judged the money to be theirs; he disagreed and spent it anyway. And then they stopped him. His drinking increased in response.

The end was messy. A brief return to his best for the 1933 season proved to be illusory and the next two seasons were largely lost to a succession of mysterious injuries. Yorkshire finally lost patience and informed him that he was no longer required. A sad final act followed: an attempt to market a quack cure for rheumatism, failed business ventures, bankruptcy, a reluctant return to professional cricket in the leagues. And more drinking, because he never gave up.

He died in disgrace, the circumstances known but kept hidden in Yorkshire circles. When the Second World War broke out, he joined the Royal Air Force as a catering officer and was stationed on Sullom Voe in Shetland. In December 1940, he engaged in a marathon drinking session; discovered unconscious in his quarters, he was taken to the sick bay and died suddenly a few days later. Owing to the manner of his death, his wife — who had stuck with him throughout the ups and downs — was deprived of a war pension.

Maybe such an end was inevitable for Macaulay. But it cost him a legacy and his memory evaporated into an embarrassed silence. In the end, he was not vanquished by a cricketing opponent, but by an unwinnable battle against his own demons and disappointments.

Note: For those wanting to know more, my biography of Macaulay, The Road to Sullom Voe, can still be found in a few places.

There was never a cricketer quite like Charlie Buller. Not in the sense of his playing ability; he was briefly good and inescapably stylish, but left no lasting impression. It was the way he burned through life that made him unique, surrounded by a cast of characters that read like something from a novel: the future king, the aspiring courtesan; the bankrupt American scandal-monger; the actress; the lord of the realm.

All of them brought together by a man so glamorous that newspapers in the United States wonderingly recounted his exploits; so handsome that no-one who discussed him could help but mention the fact. Less certain, in the cautious reminiscences of former friends, was exactly who he was, or what he stood for. They could only shake their heads in regret at poor Charlie Buller: how he had burned through money, friendships and his very moorings, to leave himself adrift.

Born in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka, where his father worked as a barrister) in 1846, Buller came from a distinguished family. He moved to England in his teenage years and studied at Harrow. In later years, former classmates recalled a glamorous figure: popular, talented, academically successful, envied. The only sour recollection — written with the benefit of hindsight but not implausible — was from an old friend who compared his influence to that of Steerforth, the morally questionable character from Dickens’ David Copperfield.

Buller excelled at sports, such as racquets and boxing, but most particularly on the school cricket field, where his technical excellence allowed him to be unusually consistent. His stylishness lived in the memories of those who saw him, especially one innings against Harrow’s arch-rivals, Eton, in the annual match at Lord’s.

When he left school in 1864, Buller was in great demand for a succession of “Gentlemen’s” teams — invitational sides comprised solely of amateurs — and began to play for Middlesex. Within a few years, he was one of the best amateur batters in England. His statistics do not stand out today, but at a time of impossible pitches, he was a leading player. His powerful wrists and extravagant back-lift attracted admiration; he even merited a cryptic recollection, fifty years later, in James Joyce’s Ulysses. And cricket helped to polish his already gleaming reputation.

But other stages beckoned. In 1866, Buller purchased a commission (that he could not really afford) in the Second Life Guards, which only added to his lustre. Yet it was his love of boxing — a sport which at the time lacked respectability among the “better” classes — that brought him the most recognition. Already famous for his exploits at school, he successfully challenged leading professionals to unofficial boxing matches. Through these feats, he met the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, a man drawn to excitement, danger and hedonism. Buller quickly became part of his disreputable inner circle.

Buller’s remarkable good looks opened other doors. He had a string of relationships and affairs, but particularly made a mark on the women of the “demi-monde” (in other words, on the fringes of respectability), a group which fascinated the upper classes. Buller was responsible for introducing one of the most notorious of these courtesans to the Prince of Wales’s circle. Sometime in the late 1860s, he met a seventeen-year-old who came to call herself Mabel Grey: possibly working behind the counter of a hairdressers, possibly working at Jay’s Mourning Warehouse. Her background is mysterious but she became infamous for her scandalous relationships with members of the aristocracy.

But while Buller could keep pace with the insatiable Prince’s excesses, the financial cost was unsustainable. As his debts accumulated, he was forced to resign his commission, although even that was not enough. He was declared bankrupt in 1871. To worsen his humiliation, he was involved in a scandalous divorce when his affair with Louisa Kingscote (née Ridley) the wife of an officer in the Royal Artillery emerged in court. For a time Buller fled to France, but after her divorce was finalised, he married Louisa Kingscote in 1872.

This marked a new phase for Buller, and he re-emerged into society. He even resumed his cricket career, although years of hard living had left him too unfit to recreate his successes. Before long, though, his life had once again accelerated out of control. He continued to be friendly with the Prince of Wales and returned to an extravagant lifestyle that he couldn’t afford. The affairs resumed too, including one with an actress called Alma Stanley. It was as if he couldn’t stop himself. Debtors circled once again and his marriage foundered. The Prince offered a solution; he employed Buller to supervise the personal collection he had lent to the 1878 Paris Exposition.

It ended badly.

Our only source for what happened is the writing of a former friend of Buller, Julian Osgood Field, who was born in New York but lived in England and was part of the Prince’s circle. He was also a rogue who served prison sentences for fraud, and many of his tales of Buller (and other famous members of society, from the Prince downwards) were printed in anonymous books which claimed to shed light on hidden scandals, but which were written to relieve the bankrupt Field’s financial distress. While the overall direction of the books might be accurate, it is hard to know much we can trust him.

His version is that when the Prince was inspecting his collection at the Exhibition, he discovered that Buller had not been fulfilling his duties; Buller refused to apologise and sent an insolent, drunken letter. That ended his relationship with the Prince. Or so Field wrote for his eager audience.

Whatever happened in Paris, scandal continued to hound Buller and he was again declared bankrupt. But this time there was no way back. His financial recklessness cost a group of his friends — who had come together to assist him — a considerable amount of money. It cost his wife too, as he carelessly used her as a guarantor because of an inheritance she was due to receive. When Buller inevitably defaulted, those former friends took her to court to recoup some of their money, and the truth about his extravagance emerged: the money lenders, the hard living, losing money gambling on pigeon shooting and billiards.

Like the Prince, Buller’s friends now abandoned him. So too did his wife. Although her attempt to divorce him was foiled when it emerged she had been having affairs at the same time as her husband — and that both tolerated the other’s infidelities — she left him and openly lived with Lord Marcus Beresford, who was in charge of the Prince of Wales’s stables. There were even rumours she had an affair with the Prince. It was that kind of world.

But it was a world that Buller was no longer part of. His disgrace was such that even his Wisden obituary delicately (if opaquely) touched on his “social eclipse”.

No-one ever dwelt too long on the cause of the fall. Was he a hedonist, chasing pleasure? Or was he an addict who needed sensation, or hard-living, or gambling, or sex? Maybe they didn’t know. Maybe Buller didn’t either.

The shell of the man who had boxed in front of princes and dukes and lords struggled through the remainder of his life. He briefly returned to the headlines when a servant stole some of his belongings — it is tempting to wonder if that was the only way he was guaranteed of being paid — but Buller otherwise kept out of the spotlight. And he lived a life of unsettled movement.

Towards the end of the 1880s, he began a relationship with a divorcee called Charlotte Anne Campbell. They never married but lived as husband and wife until Buller’s death. As well as two children from Campbell’s marriage, the couple had four of their own. But there was little stability for the family; they were always running from real or imagined problems; probably financial ones. After living on the south coast of England and in Wales, they relocated to the United States in the mid-1890s (when Louisa Buller finally obtained a divorce from an American court and immediately married Beresford). Even then, they continued to move around; they lived for a time in New York before moving almost three thousand miles to San Diego, where Buller was reduced to teaching boxing in a beach hut.

It was a calamitous fall from the heights he had once scaled.

Sometime after 1901, the battered family returned to England. Buller’s health was broken: his heart was very weak, and he had lost a great deal of weight. Old friends who saw him barely recognised the ruined man who confronted them. He died of bowel cancer and heart failure in 1906.

There were murmurs of regret, and heads were shaken sadly. Maybe one of those who read the news, and sadly remembered who Buller had once been, was his old friend, King Edward VII.

Or maybe not.

Note: A fuller version of Buller’s story, which goes into much more detail, starts here.

If the life of C. B. Fry reads like a Victorian adventure story, a Boy’s Own fantasy of impossible success, it is an unfortunate irony that Fry turned the conceit on its head. Through his own self-narration, he transformed himself into a myth. Like most myths, it bore only a tenuous link to reality.

Fry’s misfortune was that he never knew who he wanted to be. He could have been an academic, a writer, a politician, or a world-class athlete in several sports. Instead he had to be content with being a famous cricketer. Even this did not provide fulfilment. There were just enough questions, just enough falling short.

Educated at Repton School, he emerged as a fully-formed academic and sporting hero at a time when such things were possible for schoolboys. And during his four years at Oxford University, it would have been no exaggeration to have described him as one of the most famous men in England. All kinds of successes were predicted. Perhaps some of Fry’s later unhappiness arose because contemporaries whom he dwarfed at Oxford surpassed him: as F. E. Smith, John Simon and Francis Hirst were at Wadham College with Fry but went on to distinguished careers as statesmen and economists. Fry played cricket.

In fact, Fry was an undistinguished cricketer in those early days; he had greater success in football and athletics. To captain Oxford in all three was, at the time, halfway to immortality. The greatest achievement: equalling the world record in the long-jump. But in his later years, this was not enough. Instead, he insisted that he had actually broken the record; that he had done so from nine inches behind the line because of a damaged board; that he had been forced to change in the groundsman’s hut; that he had just begun a whisky and cigar, which he put down and resumed once his jump was complete. People believed the myth; he was a good story-teller.

Towards the end of this period, Fry’s mask began to slip. A bout of mental illness — a “nervous breakdown” — ruined any prospect of academic brilliance and he was awarded the lowest class of degree. His long-held ambition to join the Indian Civil Service was thwarted by a weakness in mathematics. Nevertheless, he continued to bask in a reputation for intellectual excellence. And for all his impressive sporting feats, he developed a tendency towards pomposity and irascibility when matters went against him. And then he drifted: reluctantly into teaching, around the fringes of cricket, writing occasionally.

Money was the issue. He solved it through an extremely unorthodox marriage to a formidable woman called Beatrice Holme Sumner, who was in love with a much older married man with whom she had already had children. Yet Charles Hoare’s financial support for Beatrice and her husband allowed Fry to commit fully to cricket.

The resulting prolonged burst of epic run-scoring illuminated what came to be regarded as cricket’s “golden age”. Transformed through relentless practice — something he was keen to play down later because it went against the amateur ideal of natural talent being enough — from the awkward, cramped and slow batter of his university days to a man who rewrote the record books.

Precise and technically excellent batting, built on the principle of “play back or drive”, and an association with the greater unorthodoxy and flamboyance of his Sussex team-mate and close friend Ranjitsinhji, resulted in a succession of seasons in which he produced an eye-watering number of runs, at an average that still impresses 125 years later.

But — and with Fry there is always a “but” — there were question marks. In Test matches, he batted painfully slowly, wracked with nerves and, apart from a handful of memorable occasions, easily restricted by the opposition. His spectacular failure in the 1902 Ashes was held against him for a long time, and he never convinced at the highest level. And his moodiness increased: he clashed with crowds, with the opposition, and even with his own team-mates. He eventually split from Sussex acrimoniously, leaving a reputation as a prima donna.

He had a last stab at glory, leading England to a victory in the 1912 Triangular Tournament, but the series was marred by poor weather and understrength opposition. His captaincy was eccentric at best and the win did little for his prestige. Suggestions that he might return to captain England at the age of 49 in 1921 came to nothing, and he gradually faded from the game. In the meantime, he continued to work in journalism, including as the editor of Fry’s Magazine, a publication that used his name and celebrity as well as writing talents.

In another example of the road not taken, he had — if we can believe his own account, which always requires a few initial steadying breaths — an opportunity to lead the new Boy Scouts movement, but as he was not convinced that the idea would work in the United Kingdom, he declined. Instead Robert Baden-Powell assumed the role.

The authorised version of Fry’s story says that he went on to conquer new worlds, for example attending the League of Nations with Ranjitsinhji (who was by then Maharajah of Nawanagar). He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal three times in the 1920s and enjoyed the status of being an honorary commander in the Royal Navy as the figurehead of the Training Ship Mercury. He always insisted, a little too loudly, that this was his true life’s work: fulfilling, rewarding and worthwhile. In reality, his wife ruled the establishment with a rod of iron.

She ruled him too, and it was not a happy marriage, which contributed to a prolonged bout of mental illness that forced him into seclusion for a decade from the mid-1920s. He never discussed this period, which remained a closely guarded secret.

When he re-emerged in the mid-1930s, his eccentricity was even more pronounced. Always a prolific-but-dry writer who was keen to demonstrate his weight of learning, Fry reinvented himself as a journalist for the Evening Standard: he wrote a hugely popular, undeniably entertaining and arguably ground-breaking cricket column called “C. B. Fry Says”.

Fry’s crowning achievement in this period was his 1939 autobiography Life Worth Living. He became his own propagandist and spun a myth that reinforced his greatness. If the facts did not quite support the thesis, they were easily altered. And who would dare challenge C. B. Fry, a man who could quote Herodotus over golf or compose Latin and Greek verse in the covers? A surprisingly small proportion of the book was devoted to cricket, the one sphere in which he truly excelled; which perhaps tells its own story.

Some of the autobiography’s entertaining tales have become well-known amusing anecdotes, such as his claim to have been offered the throne of Albania. Less usefully, his largely invented accounts of selection meetings and other events have mostly been unquestioningly accepted.

The book also had less pleasant aspects: not just a chapter devoted to his visit to Germany and admiration for Hitler (Fry flirted with fascism in the 1930s), but a litany of point-scoring, trying to settle scores stretching back fifty years. Belittling people who were long-dead to have the final word in forgotten arguments. And he took his unarguably impressive sporting achievements and exaggerated them for reasons that can only have been profound insecurity.

Because Fry was not a happy man. Admiration was not quite enough. He had to be believed, incontrovertibly accepted. He had to have been right when everyone else had doubted.

There is a sense that he knew he had squandered his life. Life Worth Living might have been a question rather than a description. For someone who had so many achievements, Fry died unfulfilled,.

Note: For more detail about Fry, see the three-part series beginning here.

Herbert Sutcliffe was polished to gleaming brilliance: in his batting, his manners, even his hair. He began his cricket career as a fluent driver of the ball. Any extravagance was quickly smoothed away in the austere, efficient Yorkshire side of the early 1920s. There were others to hit; Sutcliffe’s job was to stay there.

Sutcliffe's polish was not superficial; it was refined, under years of invisible pressure, hard and unyielding as a diamond. Born in the beautiful but isolated North Yorkshire village of Summerbridge, Sutcliffe was orphaned at a young age and raised by aunts in Pudsey. Playing the tough cricket of the Bradford League shaped him, and he steadily climbed the ladder until the First World War intervened. He never saw active service, but being commissioned in the Royal Army Ordnances — a rarity for a professional cricketer — gave him a certain social cachet.

Making his Yorkshire debut in 1919, he immediately impressed through weight of runs, attractively made, and established an enduring partnership opening the batting with Percy Holmes. By 1924, he had graduated to the England team where he formed another opening partnership: his association with Jack Hobbs became arguably the most successful of all time. Whether in a series of legendary partnerships with Hobbs or by himself, he won matches and acclaim, and by the end of the decade he was the best batter in England.

Sutcliffe effortlessly accumulated records — he scored over 2,000 runs in a season fifteen times (including an unsurpassed three times over 3,000) — but personal glory was never his ambition. For England, self-denial came first. He still has the highest Test average of any English cricketer, but more revealing is the statistic that his average length of innings has only ever been surpassed by Donald Bradman. Sutcliffe was never brilliant like Hobbs or Wally Hammond, nor gifted as Len Hutton or Percy Holmes; he would never have claimed to be. Instead, sheer force of will made him as effective as anyone has ever been for county or country.

Another speciality was his temperament. Being beaten by a good delivery never bothered him; he shrugged it off, got ready for the next. Consequently, he was one of the best sticky-wicket players, when everything was in the bowler’s favour. His reputation as a “lucky” batter was probably a result of technique rather than fate, but he could seize mercilessly on fortune such as a dropped chance. Even when out of form, he dug in remorselessly and had to be prised out.

Sutcliffe was the ultimate team-man. Depending on the match situation — or the orders of his captain — he could slow down and grind, or he could open up and attack, albeit in the latter case with less than his customary elegance. No matter the situation, he was equal to it. Perhaps more revealingly, he knew he was equal to it. His confidence was as important as his ice-cold nerve.

And yet this is only part of the story. Sutcliffe was not just a challenge to bowlers: he was a challenge to the whole system, a quiet revolutionary. Cricket was dominated by amateurs who captained the team, filled the committee rooms and acted to keep professionals subservient, to force them to respect their supposed social superiors. Sutcliffe never accepted that. As he did on the pitch, he radiated ambition and confidence.

From his first days in the Yorkshire team, Sutcliffe cultivated friendships with amateurs, dressed immaculately and adapted his accent (despite some mockery) to fit better into the cricket "establishment". In contrast to many of his team-mates, Sutcliffe had no intention of simply accepting his place; he was prepared to stand up for himself and his profession.

Never cowed by amateurs, he insisted — always respectfully — on being treated as their equal. Professionals were supposed to address amateurs by their title — “Mr Douglas”, “Mr Fender” — but Sutcliffe used first names. And he was as socially polished as any of them. Not everyone approved. Gubby Allen — a notorious snob — never saw eye-to-eye with him, but Sutcliffe never backed down. Quite the opposite. His determination to raise professional standards and improve their treatment made him a hard taskmaster: from dress to behaviour, every Yorkshire professional had to be impeccable. Team-mates who behaved in a way he considered inappropriate would be scolded; and he never quite forgave George Macaulay for pulling out of a business partnership in the early 1920s.

Sutcliffe also had strong views on professional captaincy. He was briefly offered the Yorkshire captaincy in 1927 before the enormity of the notion — a professional Yorkshire captain — and the negative reaction among team-mates and county members prompted the committee to change its mind and hope no-one noticed. Later, he privately opined that Jack Hobbs should have accepted the England captaincy when it was offered to him (probably in 1926); not for his own sake but for the status of all professionals. If Sutcliffe never had the opportunity to lead his county, he ensured that his son Billy played as an amateur; he duly became Yorkshire captain in the 1950s, albeit a short-lived one.

Off the field, Sutcliffe made himself into a successful businessman, establishing a sports outfitting shop in Leeds that, for a time, supplied the Yorkshire team. He handled everything himself, replying to correspondence with typical discipline. Determined to show mastery of every situation, he regularly abstained from cigarettes or alcohol for up to a month, just to prove to himself he could. Everything was efficient, from his business affairs to his manner of signing autographs or the way in which he wrote every word of his 1935 autobiography alone.

Respected by team-mates and spectators — if never quite adored — he was fertile ground for writers. Raymond Robertson-Glasgow pinned him down best: “The sort of man who would rather miss a train than run for it, and so be seen in disorder … If he is bowled, he appears to regard the event less as a human miscalculation than some temporary, and reprehensible, lapse of natural laws.”

Sutcliffe was happily married for many years — to the secretary of one of his early patrons in Pudsey — and had two children. In his later years, he enjoyed the finer things in life that he could afford through his sporting and business triumphs. He lived long enough to see Yorkshire’s disintegration in the 1950s and again in the 1970s, but kept in touch with the cricket world until shortly before his death at the age of 83.

Note: For a much longer account of how Sutcliffe was offered the Yorkshire captaincy, see the articles starting here.