Cricket Witness No 5 - Whites on Green

67 Swansea-by-the-sea into a nightmare. Indeed, there is a tale that one of the Nottinghamshire tailenders sat outside the pavilion with tears flooding down his cheeks as his team-mates came back at regular intervals. Nottinghamshire were finally dismissed for 61 shortly before 12.15 pm, with Jack Mercer returning figures of 6/31 and later in the afternoon, Lancashire were declared county champions after what Wisden described as “the most sensational feature of the season” and over the year. But the St. Helen’s wickets have not just been a bowler’s paradise, and there have been countless times over the years where a series of batsmen have prospered on the dry, sandy surface. In the words of Alan Jones, the legendary Glamorgan batsman and now Club President, “they have basically been decent batting wickets, thanks to the hard work of the groundstaff over the years, especially George Clements. Sometimes, the overhead elements have conspired against batsmen, but the bowlers have not always been on top.” 2 From a Glamorgan perspective, Alan is the best person to judge the quality of the wickets as 12 out of his 52 hundreds for the Welsh county came at St. Helen’s – no batsman has been more prolific than the left-handed opener, with more recently Hugh Morris scoring eight, including two in a match against Nottinghamshire in 1993, whilst local boy Gilbert Parkhouse also scored eight out of his 32 first-class hundreds for Glamorgan on his home patch, including 121 against Leicestershire at St. Helen’s on 7 May 1960 as he became the first and, so far, only Glamorgan batsmen to score a century against every county side. Born in Swansea on 12 October, 1925, Gilbert Parkhouse learnt his cricket in the nets at Swansea under the watchful eye of Billy Bancroft before his skills were further honed at Wycliffe College in Gloucestershire. He had A view of the St. Helen’s ground from the 1930s.