William McIntosh
[edit] "Shadows On The Screen" by "Old Northcote Boy" (William McIntosh)
The author did not identify himself by name but is easily identifiable as William McIntosh, the son of Andrew McIntosh, a long serving councillor and prominent baker in High Street. As the article reveals, William and his great friend James Morris were stalwarts of the cricket club and although McIntosh's article doesn't touch on football, they were both active in winter months as well, Morris actually playing for Melbourne for a couple of seasons before moving into an administrative role
"About the spot where I was sitting in the Sunday School hall at the jubilee re-union stood the bottom wicket of the old Northcote cricket pitch where the writer batted for Northcote for nearly twenty years. The top wicket stood on a north-west line between the corner of the Presbyterian Church property and the Roman Catholic people opposite.
Just behind long slip here stood the giant tree of the hill, and under its shadow I fielded at short slip for long years. For convenience, often I stood on a little hillock there which represented the grave of two aboriginal chiefs of the Merri Merri tribe. If only one of the spiritist's chiefs now in Melbourne would re-call the ghosts of these Merri chiefs, what a tale they could tell of ancient Northcote and their battles with the Yarra Yarra tribe. …
… where the Northcote town hall now stands was the home of the Pages. The house stood well back and had a fine orchard in front of it and I remember our ball had a bad habit of getting over the fence or through it, with the results that the fieldsman often got more interested in the apples than hunting for the ball.
These were the halcyon days. The hill was covered in trees and I believe there were more staging birds, parrots, etc in those trees that you now find anywhere within 50 miles of Melbourne. Many a summer morning half a dozen of us - the ringleaders of the club - were out on the hill at 4.40 and had a couple of hours practice before breakfast and a long days work.
Here you have the secret why the team that I was mixed up in scarcely lost, on average, more than three games per season. Being a real left-hander - I say "real" because there is nothing more a "real" hates more in cricket than a "mongrel" left-hander as we call them - that is a man batting left and bowling right and vice versa …
… When batting at the top wicket I got from 6 to 14 runs for leg hits down to Railton's yard in Clarke Street when the ball had to been thrown back by relays of fieldsman. In my young days on the hill, a Northcote Married Men's Cricket Club was formed and it has been a puzzle why they asked Jim Morris and the write to play for them. We did all the bowling and very often much of the batting for them.
There was another profound mystery in that Married Men's Cricket Club. Alex Jamieson, whom all the girls claimed was married, and all we boys used to hunt and try and find his wife! But if he was not married, he was a grand long stop and a solid Presbyterian. I think his success in the "lower" game of bowls is due to his long practice as a cricketer with his under-arm deliveries.
In 1874-75, our team walked up to play Preston one Saturday afternoon on a green situated at the corner of Bell and High Streets where the six mile post stood.
We won the toss and went in to bat and were all out for 36. Waterloo was nothing compared to the matches between Northcote and Preston in those days, such was the feeling between the two places.
The writer started bowling against the Preston team and his first ball went so close to the bails that it bluffed our wicket keeper and struck him on the side of the knee off which it glanced and a bye was run. The next five balls clean bowled five men. The late J. J. Morris (Morris and Meeks) who was killed in a motor accident some months ago (old the oldest cobber I had, we went back to 1868) took up the ball at the other end and got three wickets. In the third over, the writer took the remainder and the side was out for a bye. The bowling figures were : 16 balls, no runs, and 10 wickets.
The world, I know, is too full of discords caused by people blowing their own trumpets, but my object in introducing these personal matters is to show the present generation of cricketers that they will never get to the pinnacles we reached in those days any other way than by sheer hard practice".
