Cricket Witness No 3 - The Daffodil Blooms

16 Fairytale or nightmare? promising series of innings for the Colts, was drafted into the squad as a late replacement for their end-of-season match against Leicestershire at the Arms Park. He defended stoutly and helped to avoid the follow-on, but this proved to be his one and only appearance at first-class level. The total number of players who appeared for Glamorgan during 1922 might even have reached 47 had Bill Settle, an employee of a newly-established branch of the BBC, been able to get time off from his announcing duties in the converted office block which the Corporation was using in Park Place in Cardiff. Bill had played a decent standard of club cricket in Lancashire, besides playing in service games during the Great War, and following his move to South Wales he played in club cricket for Cardiff and also did duty on the tannoy during county games at the Arms Park. Bill also made a few appearances for the county’s Club and Ground side, but his duties with the BBC prevented him from making himself available for any of the three-day Championship games. Just two games were won during 1922, whilst eighteen were lost, including twelve in succession at the start of a truly dreadful season. The portents had been poor right at the start of the summer as Norman stood down from the captaincy, ostensibly because of increased commitments at his dental practice. A few weeks later, the Club’s Treasurer, Dyson Bransby Williams, took his own life – he had been one of the thousands of souls who had been broken either physically or mentally, or both, by the horrors DB Williams