Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

matches, against India at The Oval. It earned him a place in Gubby Allen’s team to tour Australia that winter, but he was one of many disappointments and never played Test cricket after his return. Retiring from playing at the end of the 1947 season for a life as a coach, Worthington had taken over from the much-loved Harry Makepeace at Old Trafford. It was not the easiest succession. ‘Harry was a great coach,’ says Roy Tattersall, who joined the Lancashire ground staff in 1946. ‘He could tell you what to do and how to do it. There’d be six or eight nets going on and someone would play a false stroke in the far net and he’d say, “What sort of a stroke do you think that was?” You thought he wasn’t watching you, but he was watching all the nets.’ Makepeace had taken the initiative and patiently helped the young Tattersall to convert from a journeyman seamer to an off-spinner whose bowling would win Test matches, imparting never-to-be-forgotten advice: ‘Harry told me what to do and he emphasised that those three short legs, their lives depended on my bowling. He emphasised it so much that I realised it was essential to bowl a length – because their families were in my hands.’ The arrival of Stan Worthington brought a different coaching ethos to Old Trafford. To Roy Tattersall he was still an excellent technical coach, but ‘he wasn’t an easy person to get on with. You wouldn’t ask him a lot of questions or anything like that.’ To Frank Parr, wicket-keeper of the early fifties, who also knew both coaches, Worthington ‘shouldn’t have been allowed with young cricketers.’ Devoting most of his time to the junior members of the staff, he could seem a curiously remote figure, often watching them from afar, as Roy Tattersall remembers: ‘He’d get in Alan Wilson’s car and sit in there and watch on his own for hours.’ ‘He always jumped into action when a committee member came along,’ Frank Parr says with a chuckle. A disciplinarian bringing pre-war values to the post-war age, Worthington was a stickler for smartness of dress, where he and the trombone-playing jazz musician Parr were destined to clash. Grammar school-educated and better-spoken than most of those who played alongside him, Parr was remembered by Roy Tattersall as ‘doing The Guardian crossword and things like that, but he was a bit scruffy in his dress. Trousers would be a bit stained. He wasn’t bothered if things didn’t match.’ Frank Parr has never been one for toeing the line, and this was to prove his downfall at the 20 ‘ We thought you were nineteen’