Cricket Witness No 5 - Whites on Green

68 Swansea-by-the-sea first appeared in scratch county elevens during the wartime friendlies and National Service meant that Gilbert did not make his debut for Glamorgan until 1948. However, he swiftly made up for lost time by scoring over 1,000 runs in his debut season with his maiden Championship hundred also coming that summer, most appropriately at St. Helen’s, against Sussex. He went on to pass the thousand-run mark on another fourteen times consecutively until his career finished in 1962, by which time he had amassed a grand total of 23,508 first-class runs – a tally which still places him fourth in the all-time run scorers list for the Welsh county. But it was not just the weight of runs which Gilbert made, it was the way in which he made them, with contemporaries regarding Gilbert as the most elegant, yet destructive batsman of the post-war era. Indeed, Alan Jones, his opening partner in the early 1960s, is in no doubt about the air of cultivated annihilation which was associated with Gilbert’s batting. “He was certainly the best Glamorgan opening batsman I have ever seen or played with. In my 25 years [as a player] I’ve opened with over twenty different players at Glamorgan, and apart from two imports, Majid and Javed, I would rate Parkhouse the best batsman I’ve player with for the county, with Tony Lewis a close second.” 3 Alan Jones seen during the late 1970s at Swansea with his son Andrew, who also played for Glamorgan in 1993.