by Arunabha Sengupta
At school he was nicknamed Shrimp, and it stuck all his life. But that did not offset the privileges.
During the holidays this grandson of the first Earl of Gower had a private cricket school set up for him and his brothers. It was in a covered barn in the Titsey Park of the ancestral Titsey Place. Shrimp was taught privately by Hertfordshire all-rounder Charles Titchmarsh and subsequently the Sussex and England bowler Fred Tate.
Just before he captained Oxford in his final year, HDG ‘Shrimp’ Leveson Gower was asked to appear in a pick up game at a seaside resort. He gave his name as Willie Fearon, after the esteemed Winchester Headmaster Dr W Fearon. Dressed in a startling red, green and yellow cap with a button on top, he got a hundred and was almost drafted into the county side. The knock of this new talent was reported by the local paper and many old Wykehamists sent letters of congratulations to their old Headmaster Dr Fearon.
In 1897 he toured West Indies with Lord Hawke’s side. During the farewell dinner at British Guiana, he won a wager by biting the Governor Sir Augustus Hemming in his arm. When one of the guests, a renowned solicitor, asked whether he had really bitten the Governor, Leveson Gower responded, “Yes, quite true, and it is not ten to one that I won’t bite you.” The solicitor bolted.
When he went to United States with the team of KS Ranjitsinhji, the Americans were piqued that his then hyphenated surname was pronounced Loosen Goore. They asked him to get it fixed—that too in verse.
In 1898, Leveson Gower became an MCC member. Thereafter he led Surrey, then England in South Africa, remained a selector of England for a long, long time, virtually ran Surrey cricket for more than half a century, and was the man behind the famous Scarborough cricket festival.
But he did not lose his sense of fun. When a massive man-hunt was on during the Crippen case, Leveson Gower took the Surrey professional Bobby Abel aside and said, “I don’t wish to be personal, but you know there is a great hunt for Crippen, and from the photographs which have appeared in the newspapers, people might say that there is a resemblance between you and him. Under the circumstances, perhaps it might be as well if you were to keep to the house for a few days.”
Replying “Thank you kindly, sir, I will,” Abel actually did so.
Leveson Gower attended Crippen’s trial. His father-in-law was RSB Hammond-Chambers, a KC. Moreover, the Surrey CCC President of the time was Lord Alverstone, the Lord Chief Justice, before whom Crippen was tried. Shrimp and he discussed cricket during the breaks as the trial went on. On the day the Jury had gone out to consider their verdict, Lord Alverstone confided: “Shrimp, I hope the Jury will not be much longer as I have promised to give away some billiard prizes at 4:30.”
A cricketing grandee, Leveson Gower took sides to as off-beat places as Malta and Gibraltar. As can be predicted, he was of the thorough conviction that David Sheppard, the amateur, should be made captain in the 1950s, and not Len Hutton, the professional. According to Geoffrey Howard, Surrey’s assistant secretary during the late 1940s, “He was eminence grise. He ran the club. Oh Lord, yes, he was God’s brother Alf.” By then Shrimp was in his mid-seventies.
However, he was not stuck to the rosy memories of the past like so many of these old-school cricketing tyrants. At the age of 80, just about a year before his death, he wrote: “There have been both hitters and slow players, stylists and less polished performers, great bowlers and lesser ones, but looking back we tend to recall only the giants, as if they set the average of their day. So no doubt will critics, in fifty years’ time when they look back on today deplore their own era because it is not full of Hammonds, Bradmans and Comptons.”
Henry Dudley Gresham ‘Shrimp’ Leveson Gower was born on 8 May 1873.