Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

you play straight when you’ve only a stick to defend yourself. To have someone knocking a ball at you from two or three yards away, it makes you dance a bit. You have to be quick on your feet.’ Hockey was a game at which both Wesley and Stephanie excelled and there were some mixed matches in which all three Bonds could take part together. While Wesley made the most of his time at the College in the classroom and on the playing field, Stephanie worked in the x-ray department of Martin-Baker, pioneers in the manufacture of ejection seats for military jet aircraft. Meeting her future husband, Lawrence Jenkins from the Wirral, on the Island, she was married in the College chapel. In his role as groundsman Jack worked in tandem in his first year with Syd Copley, the College’s former professional. Copley had played just one first-class match for Nottinghamshire, but his place in cricket folklore was secured when, as twelfth man in the Trent Bridge Test of 1930, he held a spectacular catch at mid on to dismiss Stan McCabe. Jack and his assistants had 35 acres of playing fields, three cricket squares and ten grass nets to tend, but it was for his influence on the boys that he will be remembered. ‘No-one should underestimate the enormous impact he made at King William’s as a coach and above all as a man,’ says C.I.M.Jones. The pace and pleasures of life in the Isle of Man might have ensnared Jack for the rest of his days, but first-class cricket retained its own magnetic attraction for him, and the news that Lancashire were once more seemingly tethered to the lower reaches of the table meant that there was a job to be done on the mainland. And, as fate would have it, a man whose finger was now on the pulse of affairs at Old Trafford had come to live on the island, Bob Bennett. Could Jack be persuaded to return to his old hunting grounds as manager? ‘When somebody suddenly asks you to put your head in a noose you have to think very carefully about it,’ Jack was quoted as saying at the time. He had no illusions that the job would be an easy one. ‘But the fingers have been itching since I was approached about the job,’ he confessed in the same press interview after his appointment was announced towards the end of the 1979 season. 120 ‘Nobody ever locked their doors’