Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

Jack and Florence had married on 2 April 1955 and they had departed for one week’s holiday. ‘We went to Jersey, which was quite something in those days. When we got back, a letter had arrived. We were away a week and the letter had arrived just as we left. So there it was waiting for me saying, would I go and see Geoffrey Howard, the Secretary at Old Trafford, on a certain day. And it was a day while we were away on our honeymoon. So I thought the chance had gone!’ Jack need not have worried. By the standard of others offered the possibility of a contract, his initial lack of response had not been an exceptional misdemeanour. The club’s minutes record that the schoolboy Alan Bolton had not replied and that, as there had been the same apparent lack of interest from N.H.Cooke, ‘a further letter should be sent to him in a registered envelope.’ Reassured to find that Geoffrey Howard was still keen to see him, Jack presented himself at Old Trafford. Like most first-time employees, he was faced with all manner of forms to complete. His date of birth was required. ‘I wrote six, five, thirty two.’ Geoffrey Howard’s face dropped. ‘We thought you were 19,’ he said. By this time Jack was almost 23. Ignorance or a slip of the tongue by the Radcliffe captain the previous summer and the unquestioning acceptance of Jack’s age by A.E.Lawton had taken him to the brink of a contract that might never have been on offer to a man of his advanced years. ‘With all the publicity, by this time they couldn’t really have it put in the papers that I was too old. I felt I was quite lucky really to be taken onto the staff.’ Jack pays tribute to the integrity of Geoffrey Howard in this awkward situation: ‘He was such a lovely man, a very honest and genuine man. And once an offer had been made, because they had made mistakes in not checking it all out, he just let it go through.’ Throughout the ups and downs of the next ten years, Geoffrey Howard would remain a sometimes lone voice of sanity and humanity amid committee and dressing-room disharmony. From 1956 he would have at his side as his personal secretary Rose FitzGibbon, ‘a mother figure’ in Jack’s eyes and a wonderful servant of Lancashire, who was destined to become the first female secretary of a county club. ‘We thought you were nineteen’ 23