DEATH OF RICHARD HUMPHREY.
It was a melancholy end which closed the career of Richard Humphrey, the famous Surrey batsman of the seventies. He was found drowned in the River Thames near Waterloo Bridge on February 24th, having been missing from his home for nearly a month.
“Dick” Humphrey was in his fifty-seventh year, and from the time that he first gained a place in the Surrey eleven he was always closely associated with cricket, at first as a very good batsman and afterwards as a coach and umpire. Tom Humphrey, the elder brother, made the family name famous in the cricket world, and the many long partnerships for the first wicket between Tom Humphrey and Harry Jupp made the fame of “the two Surrey boys.”
Unlike many of the mainstays of Surrey cricket, Dick Humphrey was a bona fide product of the county, and learned his cricket in common with many another great player at Mitcham. In 1870 he gained his first trial for Surrey, but, with the exception of a score of 82 against Cambridge University, his performances scarcely justified his promise. Next year he was much more successful, as his scores of 70 against Gloucestershire, 80 against Yorkshire, and 116 not out against Kent, bear ample evidence.
The year 1872 found Dick Humphrey at the top of his game, and in the very front rank of professional batsmen. He did well both at Lord’s and the Oval for the Players against the Gentlemen, and at the Oval, going in first, he was ninth man out for a score of 96. Towards the end of that season he scored 70 in each innings against the formidable bowling of Yorkshire when Tom Emmett and Allen Hill were at their best. Considering the difficulty of making runs in those days as compared to present day first-class cricket, we may well regard these two seventies as a much bigger performance than some of the double centuries which have been not infrequent in recent years. Unless we are mistaken, he scored over 1,000 runs in that season, with an average of something like 24 runs for forty-five innings.
Richard Humphrey never gained such a high measure of success again, although he continued to be a useful member of the Surrey team, for whom he played his last match in 1881.
He also visited Australia with the team taken out by Mr. W. G. Grace. He was a batsman of the academic and steady school, and, like most of that school, paid chief attention to careful defence, combined with some strokes on the off side. After his retirement from the active pursuit of the game he did a good deal of coaching, and amongst others some generations of boys passed under his notice at Clifton College. He also umpired very regularly, and for years was in the list of umpires for the county championship, and, but for his untimely death, he was to have acted as umpire in the second-class counties’ competition for next season.
Dick Humphrey was an amiable and pleasant companion, and his melancholy death comes as a shock to his many old friends.