5 
team, was especially hard to replace at the last moment. He did not leave till 
after the first round of the tournament in which we defeated the Royal Welsh 
Fusiliers. Captain Hickie, who had been playing No. 1 in the team till just 
before the tournament, unfortunately got ill and Lieutenant Robinson, who took 
over command of the team on Captain Williams-Wynn’s departure, was at his 
wit’s end whom to put in to make it up. Luckily the Mountain Battery for 
Crete arrived here the day before our team were to play their second round and 
Lieut. Freeland, who was well known on the Marsa some five years ago, very 
sportingly consented to play if he were mounted. He sailed away again with his 
battery the day after the match, so it was rather luck just catching him in the 
nick of time. The match was against the West Riding Regiment; our repre¬ 
sentatives played as follows : — 
No. 1—Freeland 
,, 2—IT. Robinson 
,, 3—Higgins 
,, 4—H. E. Forman. 
In the first two quarters the West Ridings had somewhat the best of it, but after 
that they began to tire, whilst our team played stronger than before, though No. I 
was rather done up, being out of condition. At the beginning of the fourth quarter 
the game stood at 2 all and it looked long odds on our winning, but then occurred 
a most unfortunate accident. The opposing team got away from a throw out 
and raced towards our goal; our No. 3 had nobody near him and was about 50 
yards from his goal when the ball came up to him. Instead of hitting a back¬ 
hander, he tried to hit it hard across under his pony ; it glanced off the pony’s 
foot and went through our own goal! After that till the end of the match we 
simply penned the opposing team to their own goal line and should have scored a 
dozen subsidiaries if the Indian method of scoring were in force. However, the 
call of time found us still one goal to the bad and thus, to our great disappoint¬ 
ment, we lost the match. 
It is a singular and unfortunate coincidence that the captain of the team 
(Captain Milne) had to leave before the final of the tournament in 1896 also. 
In rowing we have done well. The Governor’s Cup for officers’ six-oared boats 
was handsomely won by the R.A. this year, beating the Worcester Regiment, who 
won the trophy in 1896. 
In golf the R.A. suffered through the illness of 2nd Lieutenant Calthrop, who 
helped to win us the Regimental Cup last year. This year our pair—Captain 
Hardy and 2nd Lieutenant Birch—succumbed to the Royal Navy. 
The cricket outlook is still rather in the haze. We have recently lost Captain 
Adair, upon whom we were rather counting as a tower of strength. 
We have no prominent racing owners at present. Lieutenant Hinton, who has 
recently left us, always had one or two useful ponies and won in his turn. 
In the officers’ tug-of-war at the Garrison Sports our team were pulled over by 
the Worcester Regiment, which musters some very burly men. 
We have had a tremendous amount of work this year owing to the revision of 
the armament and I should be sorry to sav how many tons of old ordnance we 
have returned to the Ordnance Department. 
