History of Bucks CCC

matches for Hertfordshire in the 1930s, joined to open the batting and also averaged over fifty. There had long been a pronounced public school flavour to Bucks teams and Taylor now further strengthened the Etonian presence by bringing back David Macindoe, another teaching colleague and former pupil of the school, later to become its Vice-Provost, who had played for the county before the war. Taylor and Macindoe were both great theorists, and both in their time ran the cricket at Eton. They were soon to team up again to write an instructional book Cricket Dialogue, which took the form of a conversation in which the pair addressed themselves primarily to youngsters who might be taking up the game, offering advice that went far beyond keeping the left elbow up: M. Just to ram home the points that we have made about appearance by drawing a picture of the Impossible Cricketer. T. Good idea. Well, he arrives late. M. Without a shirt to wear. T. His pads are dirty. M. His boots are muddy. T. And several spikes are missing in them. M. His batting gloves are riddled with holes. T. So are his trousers, because he omitted to put them in moth-balls last winter. M. He wears a wrist watch while playing. T. His loose change is jangling in his pocket. M. His uncut hair flops in his eyes because he doesn’t wear a cap. T. He wears dark blue socks. With Lund fading away, Battcock now carried the attack almost single-handed, taking 50 of the 117 wickets that fell to bowlers, while Macindoe struggled once more, his ten victims costing 62 apiece, and Ronnie Rutter, returning for five matches, also made little impression. The weakness of the attack was compounded by poor fielding, while there was no obvious successor to Franklin behind the stumps. Yates, who had bowled a few leg breaks in 1946, was the first to be tried as keeper but he lost confidence and the county appeared to be searching high and low for someone to take the gloves. The call went to David Cooper of the little-known Amersham Hill club, who let through 24 byes in a total of just 242 at Stoke-on-Trent, where ‘there were an astonishing number of shooters’. Then Roy McKelvie, a tennis and squash 59 Life after Franklin Claude Taylor (without hat in the centre) leaving for Canda on a pre-war MCC tour Oliver Battcock