Cricket Witness No 5 - Whites on Green

81 Wartime and after possible, but there was sufficient time for young Gilbert Parkhouse to showcase his burgeoning talent with an impressive 71. Gilbert was one of the bright young things of Glamorgan Cricket. Born in Swansea in October 1925, and educated both locally and at Wycliffe College in Gloucestershire, Gilbert had been coached from his earliest days at primary school by Billy Bancroft in the nets at St. Helen’s. Jack Morgan takes up the story: “On his wanderings to St. Helen’s as a boy in knickerbockers, Gilbert used to delight in taking a bat and they say even at that immature age he was natural little cricketer. He had been spotted by Billy Bancroft and a personal association between the veteran and the schoolboy grew up... Billy used to say that ‘you cannot tell the youngsters a thing.’ They knew it all or thought they did. But Gilbert was an eager pupil. At every opportunity Bancroft would be at the nets, showing the schoolboy the way it should be done, and so commenced Parkhouse’s coaching – the first step in his initiation into the magic circle of cricket puritans, and which was to blossom so bountifully that he was selected to play for England at twenty-four years of age. Long before that they were saying at Swansea that Gilbert Parkhouse was a born cricketer and no-one had greater faith than Billy Bancroft.” 1 An image of Gilbert Parkhouse, Willie Jones and Wilf Wooller taken at Swansea in the early 1950s.