Lives in Cricket No 15 - Michael Falcon

nowadays to have but a tenuous connection with the team or club they serve and to move about as personal ambition, money and celebrity status dictate. To read of one whose efforts, all unpaid, were devoted to the county of his birth, should provide a lesson to us all. I remember, with gratitude, a charming man buying a scorecard at Lakenham for my recently wedded wife and insisting on her accompanying him to the middle to be shown the length where Sydney Barnes was wont to wear a bare patch in the turf! Thank you, Stephen, for your scholarly research; I am sure I shall not be the only person to have read your fascinating account in a single sitting. Ridlington, Norfolk February, 2010 Editor’s Note: David Armstrong is very modest, both on his own behalf and about his father, Rev H.B.J.Armstrong, whose parish was at St James, Pockthorpe, and who was, according to the subject of this book, ‘a mine of information’ on ‘the history of Norfolk cricket’ and an accomplished raconteur in the enclosure at Lakenham, Norfolk’s home ground between 1881 and 2000. As for his son, David not only served the Norfolk County Club loyally and efficiently on the Committee for many years, but he also became Honorary Secretary of the Minor Counties Cricket Association between 1983 and 1985, and Secretary from 1985 until 2001. This was no sinecure for, especially towards the end of his period in office, it was a time of great change in the Minor Counties game. David helped to oversee the experiment with ‘grade’ cricket and, though he retired just before the adoption of the three-day format which has proved to be such an outstanding success, his patient spadework undoubtedly aided the transition to the longer game (of which more in Chapter Six). As passionate a spectator as his father, David has seen Norfolk play away games at nearly one hundred different grounds across the country. 6 Foreword