Filed under Personal
It is with great sadness that we announce the sudden, unexpected and untimely death of John Knifton on Sunday 3rd March in Nottingham. Although he had been unwell for some while, John’s health had been improving and as always he remained positive and optimistic and had many exciting plans in mind for the future. His insights and scholarly approach to so many different topics will be sorely missed by all those who have enjoyed his erudition over the years.
John leaves behind his wife, Gaynor, and daughter, Lauren, as well as over a year’s worth of scheduled blog posts and one unpublished book. We are devastated by his sudden death and, after his funeral and when we feel capable, we will continue to publish his blog posts as well as his last book.
May he rest in peace.
Filed under Personal
A quick note to say that I will not be posting any blogs post for a little while, by reason of a relatively sudden admission to hospital.
I will be back though, when normal service wil be resumed.
Filed under Uncategorized
When I was a little boy, I used to read every comic I could lay my hands on, usually for a period of just a few weeks. I was very quick to change if they didn’t attract me for whatever reason. Some took only five minutes to read, which was clearly a waste of my sixpence pocket money. Some were repetitively inane, something which is funny the first time but not the fiftieth.
Two stories stood out and I remembered them well into my adult years. There was “The Big Tree” in “Rover and Wizard”, and, best of all, “The Last of the Saxon Kings” in “Eagle”. The Last of the Saxon Kings, of course, was Harold, and the double page centre spread began in Volume 12, No 38, and finished in that volume’s No 52.
In terms of dates, that would be September 23rd-December 30th 1961. As a little boy 0f only seven, I did not know that the story had already appeared in a publication called “Comet”, but entitled “Under the Golden Dragon”. These were issues 285-306, January 3rd-May 29 1954. The story was written by Michael Butterworth and it was drawn by Patrick Nicolle.
When the graphic novel appeared, Eagle was already on the way down and out. “Last of The Saxon Kings” was quickly accused of being historically inaccurate and of being sluggishly and insipidly drawn, with two many small panels. But I adored it.
I can still remember the thrill of reading the first four frames. They use the well tried device of a single person making his way to somewhere important, usually in darkness. I would meet it for the first time in my final year at school, in the novel “Germinal” by the French novelist Emile Zola, the man who invented cheese.
Here’s the first frame. It’s really raining. But what is this daring rider doing? :
Just look at the sheen on the soaked surface of the stone area in front of the castle:
And now we are given some idea of what is going on:
And here is the solution to the mystery. The colours are not desperately dramatic, nor is the palette particularly varied, but a seven year old was delighted:
The king, not named at this point, is actually Harthacnut. The next picture I have chosen may be the first outbreak of “historical inaccuracy”. As an argument about who will succeed to the throne develops, Harold finds himself fighting his elder brother, Sweyn. Whether it all happened in this way on such an absolutely splendid bridge I do not know:
Harold is unwilling to kill his brother, no matter how much of a swine Sweyn is. The frame below has a very Roy Lichtenstein like look about it:
Even in the most dramatic situations, the dialogue can be rather extended. Still, at least you know who’s doing what to whom and why.
Last time, we saw how Arthur Conan Doyle decided to immortalise his favourite bowler and wicketkeeper combination by combining the two names “Shacklock” and “Sherwin”, to give the name “Shackwin” to the hero of his new detective novel, “A Study in Scarlet”.
“Shackwin??” said all of his friends “Are you mad?? Think again. You can do better than that!!”
Arthur went away to think again, and he turned the name on its head. Now it became “Sherlock”. And Sherlock Holmes, a star, was born.
The next question is, of course, whether anybody else in the Sherlock Holmes books had their origins in cricket?
Well, there was an Alexander (Alec) Watson, who was a slow bowler for Lancashire. He took 1,384 wickets in a career that took in 303 matches. I believe that Arthur Conan Doyle, as a keen member of the Marylebone Cricket Club, watched Watson play in May 1886, and take 10 wickets for 54 runs, an extraordinary feat. And Alec was duly rewarded with a kind of immortality.
Here is the exact analysis of his bowling:
And in May 1877, perhaps Arthur Conan Doyle had again been there to watch Watson take 14 wickets for 49 runs against the Marylebone Cricket Club. After all, Lancashire were one of the very best teams in England .Here are the MCC innings:
And here are the detailed statistics of each bowler:
No wonder that Arthur felt he had to include “Watson” as one of his two main characters. Fourteen wickets for 49 runs is really as good as it gets! Here is our hero, second from the left……..
And a close up………………
Now, a frequent pub quiz question.
“What was the name of Sherlock Holmes brother?”
Well, he was called Mycroft Holmes.
I believe that Arthur Conan Doyle got the name “Mycroft” from William Mycroft, a bowler who played for Derbyshire in 138 matches and who took 863 wickets. I am 99% certain that Arthur had perhaps watched William Mycroft play for the Marylebone Cricket Club in May 1877 when Alec Watson took fourteen wickets for England. For the other side, though, Mycroft took a fabulous six England wickets for 12 runs in the second innings. Here we are. First of all, the full scorecard. Just look at the second innings:
And the bowling figures:
It looks as if Arthur took two names from this one single game, Mycroft and Watson. Here’s Mycroft:
Here’s another superb performance by William Mycroft, playing for the MCC against Hertfordshire in July 1879. Again, the probability is that Arthur Conan Doyle actually watched this game, insofar as he was a member of the MCC. Mycroft went out to bowl against Hertfordshire with the odds stacked strongly against the MCC. Hertfordshire, with ten batsmen needed a paltry sixty runs:
Wickets fell regularly during the innings. A wicket was lost when the score was 2, then 10, then 10 again, 11, 11 again, 15, 17, 23 and 23 again. Mycroft’s bowling figures were:
An amazing nine wickets for eight runs!! And here’s another picture of Mycroft to finish with:
Sadly, despite a fair amount of research, I have been unable to come up with the origin of the surname. “Holmes”.
Filed under cricket, History, Humour, Nottingham
As a young man, I used to go camping around Scotland with my friend, Bill. We used to travel around the perimeter of the country in a clockwise direction, beginning in Glasgow, and then northwards to the top left hand corner of Scotland at Cape Wrath. After that we headed eastwards for John O’Groats and then returned home southwards along the east coast to Edinburgh and England.
I used to take slides with my trusty Voigtländer camera. I was then able to bore people silly on wet Thursday evenings. I recently found all my slides, packed away in a very large box in the attic, but unfortunately, there were a good few which I could not identify. When I got round to doing it, one or two of the slides also suffered during the conversion process into digital images, usually acquiring either an overall blue or purple cast, or, on other occasions, with the image being much darker than it had originally been. Even so. many of these fifty year old slides had a certain value of their own.
Going northwards on the west coast, seeing the extremely steep road at Applecross is an absolute must. Here is a view of it, relatively close to the top. The white dots are sheep……
Not every part of Scotland is hard volcanic rock. This area was mainly limestone which, around 10,000 B.C., enabled the water from the melting ice cap to carve out hundreds of caverns and tunnels underneath the slowly moving glacier. When the glaciers had finally departed, any tunnels or caverns might well collapse, leaving this rather bizarre landscape of roof supports……
The mountains in the very north west are not as high as they are further south around Ben Nevis or further east in the Cairngorms. Once again, the pattern is a landscape scrubbed clean by vast sheets of ice with just a few moderate mountains sprinkled on it…….
I have wondered for a number of years, given the number of people who leave the Highlands for the big cities, how many of these peaks will have had their names forgotten in ten or twenty years’ time. These are quite a lot of mountains in this area. Who will live near them to remember their names? And who will still speak Gaelic to pronounce those names?
The language still spoken by many in the Highlands belongs to the Celtic family of languages and is called Gaelic, pronounced “G-A-L-L-I-C” and certainly not “G-A-R-L-I-C”.
Another spectacular mountain I liked a lot was Suilven, the so-called “Sugar Loaf Mountain”…..
Here it is from a rather spectacular angle. Just look how many cars are filling the one street of the village. Climbers must have been queuing to attempt the summit, a bit like Everest nowadays….
Let’s finish with one or two of the more famous landmarks in this region of Scotland. First of all, here is the entrance and some of the interior of Smoo Cave, near Durness. The cave itself is simply gigantic, a fine example of how well limestone can dissolve in glacial water. Nowadays the cave is lit up with a selection of coloured floodlights. When I was there, you needed to have brought your own torch……
Perhaps the second most famous mountain in this area is Stac Polliaidh (pronounced “Stac polly”). It is a fantastic viewpoint over the rest of the mountains in the region. It has this rather dishevelled look to it, as if it were the first ever Punk Mountain. Stac Pollaidh is not particularly high but it can be dangerous if you aren’t careful. There are paths to the top, but the are all very steep and they give you a excellent chance of falling to your death…..
Right in the very, very north west corner of Scotland the countryside can be extremely unexpected. It has many enormous sand dunes and I wish I had taken more photographs of them. Here’s the only one I could find…..
My last slide for today shows the view at sunset from the north of the Isle of Skye, looking beyond the Outer Hebrides towards the Faroes, Iceland, Greenland and Canada.
It is worth pointing out that this particular slide did did not acquire that reddish-pink cast during some conversion course on the computer. This was 1975, one of the hottest, driest and best summers of the late twentieth century,
Filed under Uncategorized
Last time, I had managed tro show you two of the three routes Widdel used to reach our patio aka “Sausageland”. He could do a tightrope act fifteen feet from the ground round the back of next door’s garage…….
He coulf take the path whose steps wound their way up the rockery…….
I didn’t mention though, the last route, which was to make his way across the lawn to the hedge between ourselves and the other neighbours’ garden, and then to walk in and out of the hedge, through the foliage, climbing upwards, slowly, until he reached a fence, a fence which, like the path, I had made some forty years previously when we first moved in…….
Then he could follow the fence along to his destination……..
The last picture was in spring. woth a moulted coat and fairly sparse vegetation. Here’s late summer with an early arrival of his winter coat…..
He’ll soon have reached his destinastion……
And then it’s off to see what’s happening in Sausageland…….
After that, he could do what he wanted. H could reverse his steps and make his way to “The Waiting Tree” which you can just see on the left of this photograph. There, he would wait and wait patiently until somebody came out, and ascertained what he wanted, as if we didn’t know…..
He might put his paws on somebody’s knee and then look wistful and plaintive until he was given a sausage or two…..
If he was feeling particularly fierce, he might even go down to the end of the patio for a quick game of “The Lone Wolf on Watch”………
Filed under Humour, My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Personal, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature
First class cricket has a very long history in England, and Nottinghamshire is one of the oldest counties. Teams of that name have, in fact, played cricket since at least 1835. During that time, they have played their home games at a world famous ground called Trent Bridge……
One of their most famous, and colourful, nineteenth century players was Mordecai Sherwin who was born in 1851 and died in 1910. In the wintertime, when cricket was impossible because of the weather, “Mordy”, an expert at catching a moving ball, actually played football for Notts County, the local football club. He was very agile and, despite weighing seventeen stones (238 pounds, 108 kilos), he always played as a goalkeeper. Even though he carried a lot of weight, every time that Notts County scored a goal, he would treat the crowd to a cartwheel.
In those days, goalkeepers could be barged into the net to score a goal, so Mordy’s weight frequently came in useful. On one famous occasion, the Blackburn Rovers outside right, Joe Lofthouse, barged him, but merely bounced off. Sherwin famously said:
“Young man, you’ll hurt yourself if you do that again.”
A little while later, Lofthouse tried his luck again, but Mordy stepped aside and Lofthouse collided with the goalpost and cut himself .
Mordy was much more famous, though, as a first class cricketer for his native county. He played 328 times for Nottinghamshire and three times for England in international “Test” matches. He scored 2362 runs as a batsman and as a wicketkeeper he caught 616 batsmen and stumped 227. We have not looked at stumpings but it is basically a way which only the wicketkeeper can use to dismiss the batsman. If the batsman tries to hit the ball but misses it, the wicketkeeper can catch it and knock the wicket over himself, but only if the batsman has wandered too far down the pitch, beyond the special white line, about a yard or so from the wicket. Here’s Mordecai. You can just about see the white line for stumpings…..
During Mordy’s golden years, one of Nottinghamshire’s most effective bowlers was called Francis “Frank” Joseph Shacklock (1861-1937). He played for Nottinghamshire from 1886-1893 and took around 120 wickets. In his entire career, playing also for Derbyshire, the MCC/Marylebone Cricket Club and Otago in New Zealand, he took 497 wickets.
It didn’t take me too long to find some examples of Frank Shacklock’s partnership with Mordy Sherwin as they played together for Nottinghamshire.
These scorecards come from the annually appearing almanac of cricket entitled “Wisden”. Here is part of the scorecard for a Nottinghamshire v Sussex game in July 1891:
In this game, Shacklock managed eight wickets for 144 runs, with four in the first innings (in a a total of 332 runs by Sussex) and four more in the second (a pathetic 38). That is a remarkable difference in the two innings totals for Sussex. Below are the bowling statistics. Shacklock took his four wickets in the first innings at a cost of 117 runs but at a cost of only 27 runs in the second. :
Here’s Frank Shacklock :
In this next game, Shacklock took nine wickets in the match, which was a fixture against Somerset in June 1892. First come the statistics for Nottinghamshire’s two innings, and then Somerset’s two innings. Look how many times the phrase “b Shacklock” appears, particularly in the second Somerset innings of just under one hundred……
A frequent visitor to watch Nottinghamshire cricket at Trent Bridge around this time was an up-and-coming young author called Arthur Conan Doyle. Arthur was a huge sports fan. He actually played in ten first class cricket matches with a highest score of 43 and just one wicket as a bowler, that of WG Grace, the greatest cricketer in the world at the time. Arthur enjoyed bodybuilding and he was an amateur boxer as well as a keen skier, a talented billiards player, a golfer and, in amateur football, a goalkeeper for Portsmouth FC, the predecessor of the present club. Here he is:
Arthur had enormous regard for the wicketkeeping skills of Mordecai Sherwin and the bowling skills of Frank Shacklock. He was very much taken with how frequently batsmen were out, “caught Sherwin bowled Shacklock”.
Arthur decided that he would commemorate the skills of these two cricketers in the forthcoming detective novel he was about to start writing. The book was to be called “A Study in Scarlet” and it would appear in 1887. The best idea, Arthur thought, would be to have “caught Sherwin bowled Shacklock” become an important part of the book. One way of doing this would be to use the two men’s names in the name of the book’s hero, by taking the first syllable from one cricketer’s surname and the second one from the second cricketr’s surname. An excellent idea, although his first effort was a very poor one, it must be said. Who could admire a detective with the first name “Shackwin” ?
And so…….Arthur Conan Doyle turned the name on its head, came up with “Sherlock”, and the famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, was born.
“But what’s the connection between Mordecai Sherwin, Frank Shacklock and a Victorian pub called the Grove”, I hear you all ask. Well, with the money he had made playing cricket, Mordecai Sherwin bought the Grove pub. I have only got a few photographs from its very last days…
…..but it would have been a nice pub during the last few years of Queen Victoria’s reign. And I cannot imagine that with a character like Mordecai in charge, his old pal rank Shacklock didn’t come along every now and again for some free ale!
Next time, two other major characters in Sherlock Holmes stories who arrived directly from a fine bowling performance at Lord’s, probably witnessed by Arthur Conann Doyle, who was a member of the Marylebone Cricket Club and who would have visited this famous old ground on many occasions.
Filed under cricket, Criminology, History, Humour, Literature, Nottingham, Writing
The garden behind our house is rather peculiar in the sense that halfway between the house and the end of the garden there is a drop of some twelve or fifteen feet down to a lawn and a few trees. The soil below this little cliff is alluvial and black and of a stunning quality just as if it had been brought there from elsewhere
Personally, I have always felt that during one of the Ice Ages some 10,000-12,000 years ago, a raging torrent brought ice cold water from underneath a glacier and carried it away to what would one day become the River Trent. As it did so, it left us our mini-cliff , and, a hundred yards beyond our fence, a much smaller, non-raging not-a-torrent, called the Daybrook.
I haven’t any pictures of this cliff, but I do have one or two which show clearly the almost sheer drop down to the lawn. Here’s the first….
The white lines in the trees (on the right) are the window ledges of the bedrooms of the houses in the street below.
In the next photograph, you can see the garage of a house in the street below…….
Because of this fifteen foot cliff, my friend Widdle was faced with a slight problem in that he had to find a viable route up to the patio where he would be given one or two of the free sausages he enjoyed so much.
There were perhaps three main routes up to the patio. The first and most difficult was to come round the back of next door’s garage where he had to negotiate a path only six inches wide with a drop of some fifteen feet to the ground below. The drop is very obvious in this picture where Widdle turns silently from his precarious perch to the safer surface of the patio, the location of our garage before we had it demolished……..
Did you notice that Wisddle’s paw is perched in mid-air, twelve feet or more above next door’s lawn ?
Alternatively Widdle could come across the lawn and then walk up the flight of steps which I myself had made when we first moved into our house some forty years previously. First of all, he might sit and wait on the luxuriant sward of a particularly damp lawn………
Or, he might just explore the grass, looking for anything interesting that he could take away with him…..
After checking the lawn thoroughly for discarded food, Widdle beats a determined path to the bottom of the steps…..
Once Widdle has made his way up to the top of the thirty nine steps, he can step out into Sausageland…..
Where, with a little bit of luck, somebody would be sitting waiting for him, sausage in hand……
He might even meet an old friend, Yin Yang, the Killer Kat…..
Filed under My Garden, My House, Nottingham, Widdle, Wildlife and Nature
Bear with me, but before we get to the meat of this post, I need to explain a little bit about cricket for those of my readers who think that cricket is some kind of insect, albeit a big, scary one, that you definitely wouldn’t want to find on your knee. This one can be up to four inches long…..
Cricket can be a very complicated sport but most people can recognise the two wickets, one at either end of the pitch.
Then there are two “batsmen”, one of whom, Batsman A, tries to hit the ball as far as possible when it is bowled at his wicket.
The other batsman, B, stands at the other end of the pitch and awaits developments. By coincidence, he is near where the “bowler” bowls from.
If Batsman A hits the ball a long way, then both batsmen, both A and B, may then decide to run as fast as they can to the wicket at the other end. Every time they do this, they exchange their original positions and their team scores one “run”. The batsmen here are wearing yellow helmets……
The two batsmen’s immediate opponents are the bowler who bowls the ball, subject to a rather long list of rules, and the wicketkeeper. Any ball hit by Batsman A is eventually returned to the bowler so he can have another go. By that point, more or less, the batsmen will have stopped running. Here’s the bowler bowling, and Batsman B waiting for Batsman A at the other end to hit the ball to the moon so that they can run 10,000 times.
Now comes the complicated bit.
Batsman A is trying to defend his wicket against the bowler, who bowls the ball from a position level with the opposite wicket. Batsman B is standing nearby (picture above).
Batsman A, at the other end, will try to hit the ball as far as possible.
The bowler, though, is trying to dismiss Batsman A so that he will have to return to the dressing room and cannot bat any more. The most obvious way for the bowler to do this is to hit the wicket and to knock at least some of it over. And then the batsman is “out” ! :
And now, the wicketkeeper. He is on the same side as the bowler, and his primary job is to stop any balls bowled by the bowler and then missed by Batsman A. If he doesn’t stop the ball, the batsmen can run, just as if Batsman A had hit it:
The wicketkeeper also has another job to do. If Batsman A hits the ball, but only nicks it, then wicketkeeper can catch it as it whizzes past at high speed, and Batsman A will be “out”, dismissed from the game, provided that the ball doesn’t touch the ground.
Indeed, this same rule applies to all the members of the bowling side. If Batsman A is a fool, he will hit the ball in the air and then when any opponent catches it before it touches the ground, it’s “Goodnight, Vienna” for him. This way of being, literally, “caught out” is the commonest way to be dismissed for a batsman:
Extremely common too is the situation mentioned above where Batsman A just nicks the ball as it passes him, and the wicketkeeper then catches it. The reason is that the ball may well be travelling extremely fast when Batsman A nicks it…perhaps 80 or 90 mph in top class cricket. If a team has a very good fast bowler, then the bowling team’s main tactic will be to get the batsman to nick the ball and then have the wicketkeeper catch it.
In the 1970s, the Australians’ main bowler was Dennis Lillee, and he bowled extremely fast, and with any luck, his colleague, Rodney Marsh, the Australian wicketkeeper, would catch the ball when it was nicked by the terrified Batsman A.
Here’s Dennis Lillee, my favourite ever bowler:
And here’s Rodney Marsh, who died recently, in March 2022. Dennis Lillee is also in the picture:
In the scorebook, that particular dismissal of the batsman would be recorded as:
Batsman A caught Marsh bowled Lillee 0
In the more usual abbreviated form…..
Batsman A c Marsh b Lillee 0
Those five words soon became the most frequent means of dismissal in the history of international cricket, with more than 200 occurrences. Here’s just one of them:
Lillee is on the right, Marsh is flying, and the English batsman is Tony Greig.
And here’s another. Lillee is on the left, flying, Marsh is on the extreme right and the English batsman is doomed.
Be patient. This blog post is definitely leading somewhere. On a journey. A journey that takes in a world famous cricket ground. An author with a household name. And a demolished pub about a mile away from where I am sitting right now. Just bear with me.
In the meantime, here’s that pub, just before the demolition men got to it:
And here it is now;
It was a great pity to lose a real Victorian pub, even if social housing replaces it.
Filed under cricket, Criminology, History, Humour, Literature, Nottingham, Writing
John Knifton 