Devon Cricket Board - Dumplings embark on first tour since 1914

Dumplings embark on first tour since 1914

THE Devon Dumplings are going on tour next week – just as they did in 1914.
The Dumplings – a mid-week wandering club that plays games all over Devon - was formed in 1902 and other than two breaks for wars has been going ever since.
In the early days the Dumplings had their share of landed gentry, honourables at the odd baronet or two as well as its fair share of army officers.
The Hon Osmond Scott was one of the tour organisers in 1914, when the Dumplings visited Sussex and Kent to play the Blue Mantles, Tonbridge, Seaford and F H Greeson’s XI.
The Dumplings have not toured since the war ended, at least they haven’t until this year.
Games have been lined up in Oxfordshire against Incogniti, who were on the first Dumplings’ fixture list in 1902, Frogs and South Oxfordshire.
‘We are calling it the Great War Centenary tour, and I would like to mark the anniversary of the war starting in some way,’ said tour organiser Peter Jolliffe and keeper of the Dumplings’ archive
‘At least four and probably more of our last tourists were killed in the war and it would be wholly appropriate to have some sort of act of remembrance, at least before our first game.
Jolliffe’s predecessor Osmund Scott – a son of the Earl of Eldon – served in the Royal Army Service Corps during the war and emerged unscathed. He died aged 72 in London in 1948.
Among Scott’s touring party who died during the war or as a result of injuries were William Charlesworth, Major Roger Cordy-Simpson and 2^nd Lt Luke Coleridge.
Harold Watts, who didn’t tour but was a Dumpling, was killed at Ypres in 1917.

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