Doing my corrections

posted by John Winn

In a posting I made last month I made two errors in describing the life of Philip van Straubenzee. These have emerged through my reading of the said Colonel's autobiography, entitled Desert, Jungle and Dale. The last of these a reference to the many happy days he spent at Spennithorne in Wensleydale.

In my account of van Straubenzee's family history I said that he was of Dutch descent which a pedant might argue was not quite right. The ancestor who came to England in 1745 was Philip William Casimir van Straubenzee who was born in Tournai, now part of Belgium but at that time that area was in possession of the Austrian Habsburgs. What that made Philip William I'm not quite sure but he was in the Dutch army and bored with garrison duty he sought permission to join the Hessian troops and this is where I really did go wrong. 12000  Hessian troops came to England in 1745 under a treaty obligation to defend the House of Hanover against the Jacobite cause, not, as I said, in support of the rebellion. Apologies

From a cricketing perspective what is important that Philip was stationed in Yorkshire near Guisborough where he met and married Jane Turner and although they returned briefly to the continent they came back permanently in 1748 and the English military tradition of the van Straubenzee family was set in motion. Just one last piece of history; Charles Thomas van Straubenzee was wounded at Sebastopol  in the Crimea War and he brought back with him the Sebastopol Cross that today stands on the family burial plot in the churchyard just a short distance from the cricket ground donated to the village in 1947 by the author of Desert, Jungle and Dale .In the event that you might visit that part of Wensleydale you could view the cross, visit the medieval church and watch some cricket.  Phew, got there in the end.

As the above suggests I have ben concentrating on cricket in Wensleydale in my research but that has not stopped me harassing by email the patient staff at The Swaledale Museum in Reeth. They have kindly scanned and emailed me a copy of the rules for The Swaledale and District League which although not dated seems likely to have been published in the 1920s. Sadly it does not list the member clubs but shows as President one Hubert Melville Martineau, a prominent enough figure in the game to have had an obituary in Wisden. Martineau had a private ground near Maidenhead where he entertained touring teams including the 1926 Australians. How he came to be President of a cricket league in Yorkshire remains a mystery but an intriguing one nevertheless.