A sad end to a short life.

posted by John Winn

Steadily falling snow and an early finish to the one sided test match between South Africa and New Zealand has prompted me to follow up the life of a cricketer who has come to my notice while I have been  preparing a presentation for the 2013 Pennine Cricket Conference. I venture to suggest that you have to be a dedicated cricket historian and probably one with a particular interest in Somerset cricket to know much about Leonard Cecil Leicester Sutton. His short life was terminated at Ypres in 1916 and is commemorated on the Menin Gate.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Sutton was educated at King's School Bruton and he first played for Somerset whilst still a pupil there. It may be that the county selectors had been influenced by the comments about Len in the school magazine for in that publication he was described as having 'an excellent off drive, a magnificent shot just behind point, a good late cut and a fine powerful pull'. What more could a batsman in first class cricket want? Runs is the answer and sadly, for although he played seventeen first class matches for his adopted county from his debut in 1909 to 1912, he averaged only a whisker over 7 with a highest score of 30 which came in his first match against Hampshire at Southampton. Alas from there it was all downhill for his second highest score of 24 did not come until May 1912 in the second innings against Kent at The Bat and Ball ground, Gravesend where he was dismissed by Colin Blythe, another cricketer to lose his life in Belgium during the war.

The end of Sutton's first class career came at Derby in July 1912 when, batting number three, the left hander was run out for nought and bowled for one in his two knocks. For their next game, against the touring South Africans at Bath, Somerset preferred another amateur  to the hapless Len, Captain Elliot Dowlard Tillard, and one  who fared little better then Sutton in his first class career, averaging 17 with a highest score of 39. Much of Tillard's cricket was played in at the Deccan Gymkhana Ground in Poona for the Europeans against The Parsees and he played only seven championship matches. He did, however get to open the batting at Lords, in a non first class match for the Royal Engineers against MCC.

Sutton and Tillard are typical of many of the amateurs who played for Somerset at this time. Their abilities are neatly summed up in the 1913 Wisden 'Many were tried but few of them were of any
class.'

Perhaps realising that he had reached the acme of his career on that day in May 1909 when he took 30 of the Hampshire attack, Sutton emigrated to Canada in 1912 but returned to Europe with the Canadian Infantry only to be killed in action aged 26, His  death is not recorded in Wisden until 1931 and there does not appear to be an obituary. Peter Roebuck records in his history of Somerset CCC that 'Everyone  mourned his death.'