Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

F.R.Poskitt. 27.7.1949.’ The presentation is fresh in Jack’s mind. ‘It felt nice shaking his hand after being whacked with the slipper for playing football when I shouldn’t have been!’ If Jack’s cricket prospered through going to Bolton School, he wonders if his reluctance to bother with the academic side of school life might have pegged him back in making a mark in the game. Had he gone on to university, as many of his contemporaries did, he feels he might have been noticed at an earlier age as a cricketer. Instead, Jack left school at the age of seventeen and his cricket was confined to playing at his local Walkden club, where he became a regular member of the second team until he was called up for National Service. After leaving school, Jack’s first employment was with the Lancashire Electric Power Company, where he worked in the personnel department, starting in the mailroom before moving on to looking after staff records. The company’s main office was in Manchester and, as Jack understood it was about to re-locate to Bolton, it seemed a convenient place to work. But the move never took place during his time with the company. ‘Are you courting?’ Wilfred Pickles, a leading radio personality of the day, would invariably ask contestants on his popular quiz programme ‘Have a Go’. Had Jack Bond appeared, he could not have denied that he was losing his heart to a girl named Florence Fletcher, just a year younger than he was. Florence and Jack had known each other as young children, and they continued to meet at church socials and dances in their teenage years. Jack remembers ‘a big old-fashioned band’ that played in Moor Hall at Farnworth. ‘The boys’d turn up and the girls’d turn up, then on Sunday afternoons we’d go for a walk on Market Street to the ice cream parlour. Lads of 15, 16, 17 – what else could you do?’ Jack recalls his first effort at taking matters a little further with Florence: ‘I asked to take her to the pictures – to meet at the Ritz in Farnworth. And I didn’t turn up! Because on Sundays my mum and dad always used to go to my grandmother’s in Farnworth, and I hadn’t asked permission to go and meet Florence.’ Jack rang up later and all was forgiven. ‘Then we were courting for a couple of years before I did my National Service.’ Like Jack, Florence was an only child. With a father Albert, who played for Farnworth Social Circle in the Bolton and District Association league, and a mother Annie who scored, cricket was 12 ‘Don’t call him Little John’