Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

‘I can see Jack taking our bowlers out on the square after matches to show them where they should have been pitching the ball and where they should have placed their fields and how the Eleven should have functioned more effectively as a team in the field. I played a lot of cricket that summer with Jack. It was always great fun.’ C.I.M.Jones moved on after this first year, in which he and Jack had combined to mould an unbeaten cricket team, to become headmaster of Bedford School. He would dearly have loved to take Jack with him, but a minor obstacle was that the resident coach, Bob Caple, once of Hampshire, had claimed CIM’s wicket for a duck in one of his two forays into the first-class game – and he had no wish to seem vindictive after the passing of the years! For Jack, his five years at King William’s was a period of supreme fulfilment. The College, at that time only for boys but now co-educational, is situated at Castletown in the south of the island. Just minutes from an airport with a regular service to Heathrow, it provides easy access for pupils from across the world. ‘We had Arabian princes and people like that,’ Jack remembers. The College provided the family with comfortable accommodation looking westward over the sea, and Jack’s mother, for the first time in her life, boarded a plane to join them in their new home. ‘She used to do her ironing looking at the waves coming in. She said, “I never thought I’d end up like this!”’ It was a happy and carefree time. ‘It was like going back thirty years. It was community living. Nobody ever locked their doors and things like that. We were just sort of one big family.’ Jack and Florence threw themselves into the life of the island. Jack took part in amateur dramatics and well remembers being roped in by Unity Rees-Jones, the Principal’s wife, as a fairy in her production of Cinderella at the Gaiety Theatre in Douglas. ‘She played the fairy godmother and she was in charge of about ten fairies, all fellows. I had to appear from the back of the theatre and walk all the way to the stage and make an introductory speech and then we started the show. I was dressed in a tutu and I wore big cricket boots and carried a wand.’ Jack took part in a wide range of sports and, in playing cricket, table tennis and hockey for the Isle of Man, he now relishes the quaint notion that he quickly became a triple ‘international’. ‘All cricketers should have a go at hockey,’ he says. ‘Because it makes ‘Nobody ever locked their doors’ 119