Cricket Witness No 3 - The Daffodil Blooms

4 Introduction Brian Halford Ask any first-class cricketer, who has played for a number of years, “What has been the crowning achievement of your career?” and you are very likely to get the answer “Winning the County Championship!” For some big-name counties such as Yorkshire and Surrey, this has happened many times. For the cricketers of Somerset and Northamptonshire, this has never been achieved, but Glamorgan, who are Wales’s only but very proud representatives in the premier county competition, have won the title on three occasions: 1948, 1969 and 1997. This book, the third in the Association of Cricket Statisticians “Cricket Witness” series, is a celebration of the first of those years in 1948 when the club was still operating on a shoestring budget and, in Wilf Wooller, had a relatively inexperienced leader, just one year into the post and a man who had spent much of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese. It is a rags to riches tale, fondly recalling those years of three-day cricket, with Championship cricket played at offbeat locations along the highways and byways of England and Wales. Like others in this series, this book draws heavily on primary data including interviews and other recollections of the participants as well as the letters and other personal reminiscences of Maurice Turnbull, the pre-war captain and the man who had helped to save the Club during the 1930s after its troublesome first decade in the County Championship. It also utilises plenty of secondary data, especially contemporary newspaper articles and match reports, which provide colour, context and a correctness of both time and place which is so essential in a book – and the series in general – where the emphasis is very much on events of the past, rather than a detailed statistical breakdown. In short, the focus is what was said and written at the time, with the key comments quoted verbatim from these sources. But this book is not solely about 1948, the year when Welsh cricketers, for the first time, held the bragging rights over their English counterparts. Instead, it looks at the lead-up to this momentous year for Glamorgan CCC, and the years before the