Cricket Witness No 3 - The Daffodil Blooms

40 Chapter Four A Welsh identity Besides stabilising the Club’s parlous financial position, Maurice Turnbull and Johnnie Clay gave Glamorgan a much clearer Welsh identity during the 1930s. It stemmed from their realisation that there was an intrinsic link between the Club’s identity and attendances at home matches, with the modest gate receipts being explained not only by the poor form but by the fact that Glamorgan often had only a handful of local players in their ranks. It had been very different during the Club’s days in the Minor County Championship when Glamorgan regularly had Billy Bancroft, the well-known Welsh rugby international and a stalwart of Swansea CC, playing alongside Harry Creber, his colleague from the St.Helen’s club, as well as Jack Nash of Cardiff CC and other well-known faces from local club cricket. Having a winning team also helped to swell the gate receipts prior to the Great War, but after the romance of their entry into the first-class arena had evaporated, it had become a very different scenario. As defeat followed defeat, fewer people were prepared to pay for the privilege of watching Championship cricket at the Arms Park or St. Helen’s, especially when the home side comprised an assortment of has-beens and rejects from English counties. Maurice and Johnnie knew that attendances would only pick up if there was a sharper Welsh identity to the team. Representing Wales in the County Championship had been one of the cornerstones of the Club’s foundation in 1888, but their Welshness had been something of a flag of convenience by which to gain admittance into the Championship, especially when their results and playing resources were far from first-class in name. In order to address these deficiencies, the committee during the early 1920s hired Fred Bowley as coach in the hope that he might, like a gold-miner in the Yukon, unearth a seam of hitherto untapped prosperity which would lead Glamorgan towards a new series of highs. But like much of the Club’s operations during the inter-war era, Bowley operated on a shoestring budget, and after several years of arranging nets for promising youngsters at the Arms Park, as well as assembling teams of young cricketers to play against club