Cricket Witness No 3 - The Daffodil Blooms

68 Restarting and regrouping As Johnnie said in an interview in the South Wales Echo during the Spring of 1946: “We haven’t got a lot compared to other counties, but we have to make the best of what we’ve got. Everyone misses Maurice dreadfully, but for his sake we just have to carry on. There’s simply no other way…..We have a small squad of players but I know that we can always call upon our three good friends – faith, hope and charity.” 1 Johnnie had never shirked difficult tasks when working in his family’s shipping business at Cardiff Docks. In his youth, he had been known as a bold rider in local point-to-points, fearlessly jumping over a series of obstacles, whilst in 1933 he had bravely stood tall, facing the Bodyline bowling of Nottinghamshire’s Larwood and Voce, and suffered a broken forearm for his pains. But in getting Glamorgan going again he now undoubtedly faced his greatest challenge. Fuelled by the heady atmosphere following VE Day, there was plenty of optimism within the sporting community of South Wales during 1946 as life slowly regained a semblance of normality. Johnnie’s immediate task was to see who might actually be available for the opening batch of three-day games from mid-May. There had always been a host of enthusiastic amateurs to draw upon, but the key question revolved around the availability and whereabouts of the professionals. With many still on National Service or recovering from their war efforts, it looked likely that he would need as great a pool of professional and amateur talent as possible but, as he said in later years during an interview on BBC Wales TV: “There was no master plan for the 1946 season. With uncertainty about so many people’s availability, we desperately tried to scrape through, week by week, and ensuring that we had a dozen players plus a scorer at every match.” 2 On occasions, even getting a scorer proved a difficulty, so the 12 th man often had to combine his duties as a substitute fielder with those in the scorebox. As the scribbled handwriting shows in the surviving scorebooks, there were several occasions when the Glamorgan reserve had to hastily copy up the entries after play! Raising a muster for pre-season also proved equally difficult as Glamorgan’s players were, at first, quite literally far and wide across Europe and the Far East. Willie Jones and Peter Judge