Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

More money came in later, and this included £125 from the MCC side touring in South Africa from the appearance of a group of them on a ‘detective’ programme on a commercial radio show, amongst them, Doug Insole and Colin Cowdrey. The family has kept a short letter from Peter May in response to Sheila Tompkin’s thank-you. The fund eventually reached over £6,500 (about £115,000 at 2011 values), a quite remarkable sum and greater than many of the benefits of the time. With the media so all-pervasive, we have become accustomed in recent years to noisy expressions of grief when public figures die. The fifties were very different; newspapers were thinner, magazine titles fewer in number and television just a couple of fuzzy channels. So the public response to Maurice Tompkin’s death, just two years after his benefit season, mostly involving small contributions to his memorial fund, was something very special. Of course, we can’t now be sure why the public responded so generously to the Leicester Mercury fund, but perhaps we should attempt to find some causes. That he was a handsome, stylish cricketer and allround games player, whose commitment and enthusiasm were evident to spectators, is one reason: there was more to his cricket than just runs on the board. His energy had brightened the austere forties and his play was attuned to the calls for ‘brighter cricket’ so freely made in the mid-fifties. He had made particular contributions to the Leicestershire cause in 1953, when the county had finished an unexpected third in the championship, and in 1955, again with over 1,800 championship runs . Even when things were not going so well there was always a smile and friendly word for team-mates, opponents, neighbours or spectators. The spectating public sensed that his attractive playing style, free of exhibitionism, was a true reflection of his personality. He was a local sportsman in the old-fashioned sense of both those words, and he had scarcely moved away, either geographically or financially, from his roots in Countesthorpe. Leicester and its surrounding county still retain a strong sense of identity, even though (and perhaps because) it often has insufficient clout to challenge the heavyweight clubs in English sport. Leicestershire people were perhaps more ready than others to recognise when a local boy had made good. Perhaps contributors acknowledged his fragility too. Despite his energy and application, he had not quite achieved international recognition; those lbws, hitting across the line, pushing the score on, were a little too frequent. He rarely figured in the top twenty in the batting averages – these were followed closely in his time – and there had been too many Graveneys, Comptons, Edriches and Mays in his way. So he could be seen to be a truly local hero, given free rein to perform for his county. Fragility includes the manner of his passing – of cancer at the end of a season when he had struggled through 26 first-class matches from Final days 121