Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

Chapter Two Learning the game Alderman Newton’s were not the best cricketing school in Leicester: that honour should probably go to Wyggeston. Wyggeston had a fine ground that the county used from time to time for junior matches, and a professional coach in William Berridge. Another grammar school, City Boys’, played on the old County Ground in Aylestone. Alderman Newton’s had neither coach nor good ground; so why Maurice should attend that particular school is a mystery, as by the time he started there he was clearly a sportsman of great promise. Perhaps even more remarkably as the son of a professional footballer, the school played rugby, rather than football, though it persisted in calling the sport they played as football. The 1938 Newtonian magazine credited Maurice with making his cricket debut for Leicestershire and scoring 91 and that he had become a professional cricketer. No comment that he had also played First Division football for Leicester. The school greatly valued academic excellence, and winning a place at Oxford or Cambridge universities was of the greatest importance. The school magazine included a report on the dinner of the Oxford and Cambridge Newtonian Association, with accounts of toasts in favour. However, Maurice was at the school for a term less than five years, from 1930 to 1935, so he did not take Higher School Certificate, and university was never a possibility. The school had five houses, and membership of these depended on where you lived. There were four houses for boys from the city (Victoria, Highfield, Westcotes and Belvoir) and one for boys from outside the boundaries, County. As ‘county’ boys, Maurice and his cousin Harry were put in County house. The school sports ground was on St Mary’s Field, on the Narborough Road. The wicket was bad and the nets worse. The master in charge of sport, Captain Osborne, was not a cricketer and the coach, H.E. ‘Bert’ Howard, though encouraging, was no great exponent of the game. During his first summer, Maurice played in the school’s Junior (under-14) XI. Their opponents were either the full-strength teams of the school houses, or smaller schools, such as the Humphrey Perkins school at Barrow-on-Soar, and Mill Hill, a Leicester private school. He scored only 57 runs, at an average of less than 10. More interesting was the 29 he scored in a senior house match as a 12-year-old against a team including the oldest boys in the school. Howard described him in The Newtonian as ‘A new boy who hits the ball very hard, and often correctly. A keen field.’ 13