Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

Chapter Nine Final days The sad truth was that there were not ‘plenty to come’, only one that was climatically wetter than a hard-wicket batsman would like, and one where form deserted him apart from two or three glimmers. The summer of 1956 had only two redeeming features: it will forever be remembered as the year that England retained the Ashes and Jim Laker took 19 wickets at Old Trafford. Maurice had returned from Pakistan complaining of back pains, and indeed missed the county’s opening first-class match, against the Australians, in May as a result of this. The decision not to play in this game was made late, for the scorecards were printed with his name on, and there was an audible sigh of disappointment as it was announced that Jack van Geloven would be taking his place. The explanation given was that returning from a hot to a cold climate had given him lumbago. Those ‘in the know’ had picked up the story he had caught some mystery illness in Pakistan. How tragically wrong were these ‘experts’. Despite his problems he only missed five of Leicestershire’s matches, and during one of these he played, in an attempt to recover form, for the county’s Second XI in the Minor Counties Championship, scoring 13 and six at Newark. Jack Walsh was the captain for this match, and Fred Foulds remembers that he was downhearted because Walsh had given him a ‘good rollicking’ for getting out stumped, at a time when he should have got his head down to save the game. ‘Maurice came and sat next to me on the coach going back to Leicester and said to me: “Don’t take it too much to heart. He means well. But you won’t do it again will you?” Jack was, of course, also perhaps Maurice’s best friend in the team. He also played in a two-day benefit match for Vic Jackson in Torquay. Altogether he played thirty matches, 26 of them first-class, during the season in which he must have been under increasing amounts of pain, not to mention very poor batting form. Leicestershire unhappily maintained their record of doing well in good summers, and badly in wet summers. Though not as wet as 1954, there was a great deal of bad weather in 1956. Leicestershire have never been a well-supported county, but the total paying attendance for fourteen championship matches was only 24,000, compared with 60,000 in 1953 and 65,000 in the sun-drenched summer of 1947. Maybe the attitude of the Australians in the first match of the season, where they batted for two days and refused to declare, put off some paying customers. 115