Maurice Tate was born in Brighton on 30 May 1895. He died in Wadhurst on 18 May 1956. I was reminded of him by virtue of coming across a poem, in a 1956 issue of the Sussex County Magazine, which contained a eulogaic poem to the cricketer:
The master of length and fiery pace
Who flourished neath the Sussex sun
Will play with Nyren, now, and Grace
And share with them his sense of fun
That glorious run up to the crease
The upflung arms, the tousled hair
His smile - were part of summer's lease;
In Austral climes he spreads despair
And now, though Sussex fields and Lord's
Will know no more his friendly grin
He'll battle on Elysian swards
With Fuller Pilch and Alfred Mynn
which is attributed to Rowland Ryder.
Tate was an all-rounder who played for Sussex between 1912 and 1937 (those were the days when one could remain competitive in county cricket into one's forties). He also played for England between 1924 and 1930. In his test career he played 39 times for England, scoring nearly 1200 runs at an average of 25.48. He scored only one century - 100 against South Africa in 1929. He took 155 wickets at an average of 26.16, his best performance being 6 for 42 (but I haven't yet discovered when and against whom).
Sadly he didn't have a rewarding life post cricket. He became a publican, his last licensed premises being the Greyhound in Wadhurst. However he remained keenly interested in the great game. But he was out of the spotlight. Having fallen on hard times, he took a job coaching cricket at Butlins, Clacton, in 1956. But equally he umpired the Australian touring side's first match in their 1956 tour of England, it being the traditional fixture against the Duke of Norfolk's XI at Arundel in April 1956. Three weeks later he was dead of a heart attack at the age of only sixty. He was buried in the churchyard of St Peter & St Paul, Wadhurst. Back in 2010, an article in The Guardian reported that his grave was neglected, weed covered and subsiding on the slope. I do hope that the article spurred somebody or somebodies to restore the grave in order that it might remind people visting the churchyard of what a fine cricketer was buried there. Maybe one of the gravewatchers on this forum might take a look, next time they are in that part of the world, and take a photograph of his grave and post it here.
