Famous Cricekters No 53 - George Geary

blazer, he would stop for a chat in the Bursary on the edge of The Close almost alongside the nets. At his age he was not expected to turn his arm over. He would stand with the bowlers, offering a few quiet and carefully chosen words, and behind the nets standing to observe vigilantly the batsmen. He was far and away Rugby’s most distinguished coach in its long history: its list has included Emmett, Fielder, Ashdown, Booth (F.S.), and Livingston. In addition to frequent meetings on The Close, we would sit together at Leicestershire’s post-war Grace Road ground, he in his broad rimmed trilby acknowledging the cordial greetings of passers-by in front of the pavilion where we would find a protected spot unless we were invited into the Committee Room. His election as a Vice-President was the first for a Leicestershire professional but long delayed and, remarkably, had to be pressed for. Eventually, a modest stand was named after the County’s most eminent allrounder. In the Committee Room I would get the loquacious Aubrey Sharp, a former captain of his, to hold forth on his sometimes eccentric but always vividly demonstrated secrets of batsmanship over which Geary would smile indulgently, for after all Sharp was a consistently successful first-class performer, near Gentlemen standard, on his rare escapes from his practice as a solicitor. Their presence, as almost the only players of the period between the Wars, was by the 1970’s not appreciated, I felt, by other Committee members and officials watching the game as much as they should have been; Sharp was too lively, Geary too retiring, a delightful foil to each other embodying the feel of the 1920’s and 1930’s. It was when Geary and I were sitting alone outside the Committee Room that I could best get him, whilst keeping a paternal eye on what was happening in the middle, to expand, although he had done so in my drawing room at Rugby after nets. This reminds me that he followed his bold script signature in my Visitors’ Book in the address column with “Leicester, MCC”. He was always laconic; his talk would not extend to adding “shire” after the counties he mentioned if he could avoid it. It was always “Leicester”, “Derby”, “Gloucester”, “Nottingham”, “Warwick”, “Worcester”, “Northampton”. He couldn’t abbreviate “Yorkshire”, “Lancashire”, “Hampshire”. But he inexorably gave me the impression that he relished a quiet talk about his times and their being recalled. A series of articles by him in a Leicester newspaper was all too short. Now his was a type of cricket book that should have been extracted from him as opposed to the plethora of ghosted, repetitive recitals of those still currently playing, perspective only being possible when standing outside and looking back. On the MCC tour in 1927 of South Africa, the captain, Major R.T.Stanyforth ( later to be Equerry to the Duke of Gloucester, Governor General of Australia ), said to Geary “You’re the eldest of a family of 16, I know, and that’s even larger than the whole of our party, so you’re used to looking after young ones. I’d very much like you to have as your room mate young Wally Hammond”. Geary told me that he and Hammond got on famously during the tour. I mentioned that I had played against Ronny Stanyforth before the War. Geary observed that he wasn’t a great player, not Test standard, but good enough a wicket-keeper to take his variation of in and out swing and his off and leg cutters fizzing off the matting , and also to read the slow bowlers, who included Ewart Astill. Geary went on: “Major Stanyforth as captain was a gentleman, like Mr. Chapman and Mr. Gilligan”. He didn’t mention A.W.Carr, R.E.S.Wyatt, and J.C.White, other England captains of the period. I refrained from asking him if Hobbs or Sutcliffe would ever have been suitable as captain, and I never raised Astill’s name as I always understood that in such close contact season by season (they shared also three overseas tours) in the same dressing room they were only overtly friendly, Astill mixing more with the amateurs. I sensed that this was the relationship because, although Geary raised quite a few names in our numerous conversations, Astill’s came up only the once when referring to “the Major reading” his slow bowling, and Astill had been captain of the Leicestershire team containing Geary when he was the first professional captain of any county side for a season before the Second War. Space precludes me from further recollections of a firm friend, as it did in my obituary of George in The Times which published with it a fine picture of his handsome features. The penultimate paragraph in the obituary was “All his distinguished performances and dedication apart, the most 5