Cricket Witness No 3 - The Daffodil Blooms

5 Second World War when the Club faced severe challenges just to survive in first-class cricket. Those days of hardship and strife, no doubt, made the champagne taste even sweeter in 1948, and this book helps to evoke the feelings of warmth and pride which so many Welsh men and women felt after the momentous victory by Wilf Wooller’s team against Hampshire at Dean Park. Finally, at a more general, countrywide level, this book also reminds us, as the modern watchers and supporters of county cricket, how the game has changed, especially the outlook of the county captains and the now almost lost art of declarations, as well as the days of happy-go-lucky amateurs and taciturn professionals eking out a modest living, in contrast to the modern era with international players commanding the big bucks. Andrew Hignell During my life so far, I have only known and appreciated two of the summers when Glamorgan were county champions – the first came in 1969 when I was a schoolboy in Cardiff, attending a primary school in the northern suburbs of the Welsh capital, where the teaching of the Welsh language was given priority. With this in mind, I was very fortunate that Ton-yr-Ywen School was visited by various Glamorgan professionals, and on many summer afternoons my classmates and I were able to learn and enjoy the rudiments of the game from our enthusiastic teachers, augmented by some of the county’s players. My limited abilities with bat and ball were more than made up for by enthusiasm, and I can still remember that wonderful afternoon in early September 1969 when Mr. Watkins, my sports-mad class teacher, quietly called me into his office at the back of his room. Our class had been set a mathematics test, and with my classmates all engrossed in the numerical tasks, he beckoned to me to join him as he popped into his office on the pretext of sorting out some graph paper for us to use. In reality, it was because he had a transistor radio in his office, tuned into BBC Radio Wales, and it was there alongside, I still remember, a rather dewy-eyed teacher, that I quietly heard the words of Alun Williams, the Corporation’s legendary sports reporter in Wales, confirming that earlier that afternoon Glamorgan had defeated Worcestershire at Sophia Gardens and that Tony Lewis and his side were now “the County Champions of 1969”. “What a great day, Andrew,” Mr. Watkins softly said, and then Introduction