Lives in Cricket No 14 - Jack Bond

Chapter One ‘Don’t call him Little John’ ‘Have you seen Little John?’ Ruth Bond’s two sisters would enquire. ‘My mother got fed up of it,’ Jack Bond now relates. ‘“I’m not having you calling him Little John – it’s like something out of Robin Hood.”’ At his christening John David Bond had been given the first names of his father and of his maternal grandfather, but it was not long before the baptismal choice was causing confusion in the tightly-knit extended family. So, to avoid any spurious links with Sherwood Forest, it was decided that the future Lancashire cricketer should be called Jack. Jack Bond was born on 6 May, 1932 ‘within a six hit of the local cricket club’ at Nurse Berry’s, Clamerclough House, Kearsley. Three days later his mother was allowed to take her baby home to the village of Little Hulton, three miles south of Bolton, where the Bonds owned a terraced house at 142 Worsley Road. John Bond, a spinner in the thriving cotton industry, had married Ruth Lee, a weaver, in 1930 and Jack was to be their only child. ‘But I never felt like an only child,’ he now says. ‘Two cousins lived next door and another cousin lived next door but one. We were virtually brought up as brothers and sisters in the war years, so I never felt the need of a brother or sister.’ At the centre of this little family group were Jack’s maternal grandparents. His grandfather, David Grinrod Lee, was a master butcher whose business was at number 140 Worsley Road. Ruth’s sister Maggie and family lived with her parents, while her other sister Annie resided at 138. A brother Jim lived in nearby Farnworth, also working as a butcher. David Lee died shortly before the outbreak of war and the three sisters then ran the shop until their brother was granted compassionate release from military service on account of his wife’s poor health. When he returned, he took over the running of the Worsley Road business. The Lee side of Jack’s family were staunch Methodists, reflecting the childhood roots of his maternal grandmother. Grandma Lee, as 7