Cricket Witness No 5 - Whites on Green

71 Swansea-by-the-sea Gilbert was also injured during Glamorgan’s match against the 1956 Australians at St. Helen’s. He was not alone on the physio’s table as Jim Pressdee also took a blow and without a 13th man, an emergency announcement was made for another fielder. Sat in the crowd was the then seventeen year old Alan Jones who was on the junior staff. As he recalled: “Phil Thomas, the assistant secretary came over the tannoy and said ‘Is there anybody in the ground from the Glamorgan staff? Could you report to the pavilion!’ I heard that and went to the pavilion. They wanted me to go on and field but I had no kit with me. So they showed me Bernard Hedges’ spare kit. We were the only two people in the club who were the same size! So I had his boots and all of his spare kit on as I walked down the steps and out onto the ground in front of so many people. When you were a kid, nothing meant more than wearing the daffodil and here I was for the first time in a big Glamorgan match wearing Bernard’s kit! To cap it off, the first person to hit a ball to me on the field was Neil Harvey, my hero.” 5 1. T.Heald, The Character of Cricket (Pavilion Books, 1986). 2. A.Jones, with T.Stevens, Hooked on Opening (Gomer Publishing, 1984). 3. Ibid. 4. S.Hedges, The Player from Ponty (Welsh Academic Press, 2018). 5. op.cit. A view of the St. Helen’s ground from the Patti Pavilion in 1934.