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

97 The Flood (2) HK Rodd The Wonder Man Roundhead odds with his dashingly Cavalier cricket. He has to fall back on stonewalling but, as the last pages of this gripping tale are missing from the Thomson archive, we know no more. If I was forced to hazard a guess, I would opt for a happy ending and a stunning cricket triumph. The 1949 season’s Wizard story was Second Wicket Wakefield. Harry Wakefield gives up his conjuring career to practise his wizardry on a failing county side which has just achieved first class status. With detailed descriptions of matches and weekly cricket tips, the serial covers the period 1926 until the year of publication, when the county win the championship. Sweetman acutely points out the parallel with Glamorgan and their rags to riches title of the preceding summer of 1948, recently celebrated in brio style in this series in The Daffodil Blooms . If Sweetman is correct, it makes Harry Wakefield a kind of Maurice Turnbull/Wilf Wooller cross. Thus to 1950 with no direct cricket story but a return to the school story with the long-running ‘Smith of the Lower Third’, which featured lots of cricket in the summer months. The Wizard thereby ensured that cricket was well-served in that immediate post-war period. The cricketing deeds of Rob Higson in The Rover were referenced in the Introduction to this book. ‘It’s Runs that Count’ and similar series about Rob and Highshire and England cricket ran from 1947 to 1959, comprising no less than 116 episodes. In 1956 there was also ‘Chained to the Bat’, the complex story of John Taggart, the son of a Test player, who was dragged as a child from the car accident which killed his parents by The Coach, Sam Billiard, also a former Test cricketer and reared on a remote island. John Taggart is illiterate to the point of not being able to read his total on the scoreboard. He is chained to his bat although he has a key to aid him when fielding. His career does not run evenly. His bat gets destroyed by a gorilla and he is struck by lightning just prior to his Test début for which the cunning Australians select a bowler from the Outback who keeps a ball tied to his wrist with a piece of string.