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It was not any famous struggle that was being fought out on the old Ailesworth Ground; it was only second-class cricket, the deciding match of the Minor Counties championship. Hampdenshire and Oxfordshire, old rivals, had been neck-and-neck all through the season, and, as luck would have it, the engagement between them had been the last fixture on the card.
Hampdenshire has never come into the field with weak bowling, and all the credit belongs to Ginger Stott. One sees that he was not able to appreciate the wonderful gifts of his own son, but Stott was an ignorant man, and men of intellectual attainment failed even as Stott failed in this respect. Ginger Stott was a success in his own walk of life, and that fact should command our admiration.
It was in this year that three very promising recruits, all since become famous, joined the Eleven, viz.: P. H. Evans, St. John Townley, and Flower the fast bowler. With these five cricketers Hampdenshire fully deserved their elevation into the list of first-class counties.
It was not until he was twenty years old that Ginger Stott played in his first Colts' match. The three years that had intervened had not been prosperous years for Hampdenshire. Their team was a one-man team. The best of the minor counties in those years were Staffordshire and Norfolk. In the Colts' match Stott's analysis ran: overs maidens runs wickets 11·3 7 16 7
This brief history of the Hampdenshire Wonder is marked by a stereotyped division into three parts, an arbitrary arrangement dependent on the experience of the writer. The true division becomes manifest at this point. The life of Victor Stott was cut into two distinct sections, between which there is no correlation.
It was the fourth innings, and Hampdenshire with only one more wicket to fall, still required nineteen runs to win. Trigson could be relied upon to keep his wicket up, but not to score. The hopes of Ailesworth centred in the ability of that almost untried colt Bobby Maisefield and he seemed likely to justify the trust reposed in him.
He himself certainly did much to promote it, and his generosity in making good the deficits of the balance sheet, had a great influence on the acceleration of Hampdenshire's triumph. In his second year, though Hampdenshire were again champions of the second-class counties, Stott had not such a fine average as in the preceding season.
Would any captain in Stott's second year have dared to take first innings under such conditions? The question is farcical now, but not a single member of the Hampdenshire Eleven had the least conception that the Surrey captain was deliberately throwing away his chances on that eventful day. Wallis and I were sitting together in the reporters' box.
I think there must have been a wonderful esprit de corps among the members of that early Hampdenshire Eleven. There are other evidences beside this refusal of its two most prominent members to join the ranks of first-class cricket. Lord R , the president of the H.C.C.C., has told me that this spirit was quite as marked as in the earlier case of Kent.
He bowled Mallinson with his second ball, and the innings was finished up in another fifty-seven minutes for the addition of thirty-eight runs. Hampdenshire made two hundred and thirty-seven for three wickets before the drawing of stumps, and that was the end of the match, for the weather changed during the night and rain prevented any further play.
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