Cricket Witness No 6 - His Captain's Hand on His Shoulder Smote

96 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man he was literally a self-made man who had taught himself a formula of diet, training and will power that brought him longevity and sporting distinction. First portrayed in 1943, he contrived, amid the minor business of running a three minute mile and climbing Everest, to secure cricketing success for England in the story ‘The Year of the Shattered Stumps’. This came in 1953. The sports reporter Reg Webster follows up accounts of a village team Mingsford being all out for 40, all extras, submitting to the speedy pace of one Wilkins, who turns out to be Wilson. After the usual negotiation of trying incidents, Wilson plays for England in the crucial final Test and dismisses Australia for 30 and 20, England scoring 160, and to the dismay of the wise Simon Sweetman, illegally enforcing the follow-on, the match being completed in one day. Before this, during the summer of 1947, ‘Nipper, the Boy Bowler with the Magic Fingers’ entered the fictional cricket field. An orphaned vagrant but never without a cricket ball in his hand, chance finds him on the Woldshire county cricket ground, where the team are practising, He picks up a ball and clean bowls their best batsman, Bradbury. He’s spotted by Eric Martin who discovers he has a Mineshire residential qualification. He is befriended across the class chasm by the monocled Hon Bertie Mannering and is chosen to play for Mineshire against Woldshire in which match he again bowls Bradbury first ball. Before a packed house, he takes 8 for 12 and 6 for 28, gaining a comfortable victory. There follow comings and goings. including an arm injury that leads Nipper to find he is able to bowl equally well with his left hand, but, in true Jack and the Beanstalk mode, the tale ends with Nipper “transformed from a homeless street boy into a brilliant young cricket professional”. The 1948 yarn was ‘He Never Hits Sixes ’. The amateur all- rounder AWR (Bill) Johnson, the ‘Gay Cavalier of Cricket’ had scored 3000 runs and taken 150 wickets in 1947. A research student for the scientist Sir Henry Cronin who is experimenting with a drug to cure a form of paralysis, he volunteers to be a test case, his resultant immobility at