Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

Chapter Two ‘We thought you were nineteen’ Back in Lancashire for the 1953 season, Jack continued to play his cricket for Walkden, where he had been a junior member since his early teens. The Bolton League club’s professional was a West Indian, Edwin St Hill. In a brief first-class career, six wickets for Trinidad against British Guiana had won him two Test caps as a first change pace bowler against the Hon F.S.G.Calthorpe’s England side in 1929/30, and he was included in the West Indies party for the tour of Australia the following year. Though he enjoyed little success at the highest level, with just three expensive Test wickets, St Hill had been a prominent club cricketer in his native Trinidad, where he played for Shannon alongside his more famous brother Wilton. Edwin St Hill had passed his fiftieth birthday when Jack played alongside him at Walkden, his experience of English conditions 15 Jack, captured by a Brownie camera at Walkden, 1953.