History of Bucks CCC

Next year, with Johns and Stoddart batting well, Bucks rose to seventh. This was the first of three seasons in which David Johns was captain, but his reign was not marked by great success. Working in the diamond trade, the new captain had employers who were not sympathetic to him taking time off to play cricket, so he could manage to play in only seven of the ten games. Superb player as he was – “he always seemed to have so much time and the middle of his bat seemed a yard wide,” said a contemporary – Johns, for all his personal popularity, was not a natural captain. An intensely serious competitor, he was also a great theorist, but some of his players found his outlook a bit defensive after the more cavalier approach of Barnett. Curiously, too, for one of such exceptional talent, Johns was always nervous before batting, and this could sometimes impair the confidence of other members of his team. In 1957, when Pickett was away, having taken up an appointment as professional with Haslingden in the Lancashire League, Bucks slipped to nineteenth. Three of the matches were only narrowly lost, making the overall performance seem worse than it had really been, though one of Bucks’ only two victories came in the tightest of finishes when two leg byes were scampered off the last ball to beat Oxfordshire with the last pair at the wicket. A newcomer of interest this year was Donald Steel, later to become a respected golf correspondent and course designer. He played in just six matches, always opening the batting, but 62 on debut was his only fifty in a disappointing season. More significant were the first appearances of two of the county’s finest post-war players, Bill Atkins and Fred Harris. Amersham’s Atkins, christened Gerald but always known as Bill, had captained the Young Amateurs and, when he played the last of his 107 championship matches in 1972, his nuggety left-handed batting had brought him 4,689 runs. But it was as a world-class cover point that he will always be best remembered, the blue he won at Cambridge in 1960 owing much to his ability to swoop on hard-hit balls and return them with unerring accuracy to the top of the stumps. His reputation alone saved Bucks countless runs and gained many crucial run outs. Fred Harris from Chesham, played in the final match of the 1957 season. The most widely respected of opening bowlers in local club cricket, Harris is remembered by those who played against him as one off whom it was exceptionally difficult to score – “especially on a green top at Chesham,” adds one High Wycombe opponent. Deadly accurate, he bowled inswingers and off cutters at a lively pace. Though Harris may not have been regarded as an out and out pace merchant, his speed in a match at Folkestone nevertheless earned from Ben Barnett the accolade of being, on that day, the quickest bowler to whom he had ever kept. Like so many of the strictly amateur players who comprised the Bucks teams of the period, he seldom played in all the matches, but his Bucks career stretched into the mid-1970s, bringing him 323 wickets for the county. In the depressingly wet summer of 1958, Bucks finished twelfth. Johns, who averaged 53.33, suffered a foot injury and missed half the matches. His deputy, Geoff Reynolds, led the team to one sensational victory at his home club Chesham. With eight wickets down, Kent Second Eleven had settled for a draw when the final over began. Reynolds, who had not previously bowled in the match, decided to try his luck. Off his first ball Barnett achieved a stumping and from the last Stoddart snaffled a catch to bring Bucks a 40-run victory. 66 A hard act to follow Bill Atkins