Famous Cricketers No 82 - H.E. 'Tom' Dollery

on doors near the ground and say you are on the Warwickshire staff – someone will take you in”, and that’s just what he had to do. He was taken in at 33, Princess Street, near the Edgbaston ground where he lodged until the end of the season. I wonder how some of the pampered young “stars” of today would have reacted to that! He was offered a full contract at the end of the 1932 cricket season, which meant he had to live in the county to qualify. That winter he was employed in the county’s offices, then situated in Birmingham city centre, so he lodged in “digs” with Leslie Deakins, the club’s Secretary after the war, but then a young office assistant. The following summer he lodged with Arthur Croom’s family, and he lived there each summer until he got married at the end of 1936. Whilst qualifying in 1932 and 1933 he was loaned out to Smethwick in the Birmingham League on Saturdays, played for the county’s Club and Ground side and Second X1 and for Berkshire in the Minor Counties Championship. During the winter months in Birmingham he turned to local amatuer soccer to keep fit, and being the natural athlete and competitor he was, he was soon being noticed by scouts from League clubs. He was a two-footed, intelligent inside or centre forward and West Bromwich Albion offered him a trial in the winter of 1933-4 and he played several times for their Colts team. Whilst in Reading over the New Year period he was invited to play for a local team, St.Mark’s Wednesday, where he was spotted and later signed up professionally by Reading Football Club, (then in the old Third Division South), so from July 1934 he became a professional sportsman in both winter and summer. He made one appearance in Reading’s first team during his two seasons with them, but a bad fall which dislocated his shoulder and which gave himmore and more trouble over the next few years, made him decide, for the sake of his cricket, to give up the winter game for good. Dollery had notched up two centuries and a fifty for the Second X1 before his Warwickshire first-class debut in 1934. He made his debut on the very day he became qualified against the Champions, Yorkshire, at Scarborough in a sensational game that sawWarwickshire record their first win against the Tykes since 1927. Tom’s was a modest start, lucky not to register a “pair”, but after that he quickly established himself as the best batsman in the side, apart from R.E.S.Wyatt in the years leading up to the war. Had he been a member of a more “fashionable” county there is no doubt that he would have been given more chances in representative cricket and probably have played for England, he certainly deserved to on form, especially in 1939. He was selected for the aborted MCC tour to India in the winter of 1939-40, (his wife Jeanne actually remembers putting the MCC labels onto packing cases to be shipped out ahead), and he would, with a bit of luck have picked up his first England caps then. During the Thirties he was an attractive, attacking, off-side batsman and a deadly cover fielder with a very accurate throw before his shoulder injury disrupted this part of his game. From a personal point of view the highlight of the Thirties was his marriage to Jeanne Llewellyn Mills at St.James Catholic Church, Reading, (situated next door to Reading Goal, famous for Oscar Wilde’s incarceration there), on Boxing Day, December 26th 1936. The couple had first met when they were at school in Reading, Jeanne being from the local Convent school; Jeanne recalls that Tom’s reputation as a sportsman was well known throughout the town even then. They set up home in West Bromwich until the outbreak of war, when Jeanne returned to live with her mother after her husband was posted abroad. After the war they lived in Ampton Road, Edgbaston, until 1954, when they went into pub management. A son, David was born in October 1947 and Tom and Jeanne would eventually notch up a half-century of marriage together just before Tom’s death. Dollery wasn’t the only cricketer to have his career ruined by the war of course, but he probably suffered more than most, and his experiences must have shaped his subsequent attitude to life in general. He enlisted in the Army on April 2nd 1940, but he was soon transferred to the R.A.F. to train as a pilot out in Canada during 1941 and ’42, so Jeanne returned to live in Reading. She put all their belongings and furniture into storage in West Bromwich, only for the warehouse to receive a direct hit during the Blitz in the winter of 1940, and they lost absolutely everything! Meanwhile he was having more and more trouble with his shoulder and it actually “popped out” while he was at the controls of a 7