Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

development and remain a good friend in later life, Cec Pepper. One who has always listened to advice now found it coming in the ripe language of an Australian, who had played in the Victory Tests before settling in England to become one of the league’s most successful professionals. ‘It was the first time I came in touch with sledging,’ Jack recalls. ‘Some of his language was choice. We had a chap called Jeff Yates, a quick bowler from Little Lever. He was training to be a Congregationalist minister and he was in the team as well. It got to the stage where Cec would have to change in the toilet because of his language!’ Radcliffe made demands on those who expected first-team cricket. ‘If you missed practice, you wouldn’t get picked.’ So twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, kit in hand, Jack would leave work and catch a train from Manchester to attend the practice nets at Radcliffe; and there was a bus journey home before he could sit down to a late evening meal. But life in the higher league had its compensations. ‘One bonus was that, when we played away, the club hired a coach. That was really upmarket fromWalkden, where you had to make your own way on the trams and buses. To be taken to the ground on a coach – you felt you were really going somewhere.’ Jack was soon in the runs and he was now performing on a stage where good performances would not go unnoticed. ‘Then I had a real stroke of luck,’ he remembers. In the 1950s Manchester boasted two evening papers, soon to be amalgamated, but then keen rivals, the Evening Chronicle and the Manchester Evening News . The Chronicle’s cricket correspondent was Eric Todd, but the paper also took steps to involve itself with league cricket, sending a former Derbyshire player A.E.Lawton to cover matches and requiring him to find eight young players for whom the paper would fund winter coaching at Old Trafford. Albert Edward Lawton, born in 1879, had made 131 appearances as an amateur for Derbyshire, leading the county at various times across eight different seasons before playing a handful of matches for Lancashire in the last three summers before the Great War. An old Rugbeian, well connected in the game, he had also played for W.G.Grace’s London County. Now, in the twilight of his days, Lawton toured the principal league grounds of Lancashire, visiting a different club each Saturday, after which he wrote a substantial ‘We thought you were nineteen’ 17