Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

Chapter Five War and Peace, 1940 to 1949 In September 1939, Maurice was in his twenty-first year and, as we have seen, therefore in the front line for military service in more ways than one. He enlisted for the Royal Army Medical Corps and underwent training at Goodwood House in Sussex. (His mother, perhaps disappointed that the Army seemed unable to make fuller use of her son’s talents, once described him spending the war as an ‘optician’s lackey who spent his time playing football and cricket’.) By Christmas he was part of the British Expeditionary Force and despatched to France. By June, he was on his way back again, evacuated from Dunkirk. He married Sheila Randle on Saturday, 27 July 1940 at Blaby Rural District’s register office in Narborough. Maurice was described as Private No 7360606 and a professional cricketer, Sheila as a railway clerk. The announcement in the Leicester Evening News said ‘very quietly’. Not all weddings that troubled summer were conducted ‘very quietly’; indeed on the same day the local papers were full of wedding notices and pictures of happy brides and grooms celebrating their nuptials. These included the captain of Leicester Nomads cricket club, so maybe the Tompkins decided not to create a rival attraction that would inevitably involve similar people. The fathers, Percy Tompkin and Jack Randle, formally witnessed the marriage, and the addresses given were ‘Amulree, Countesthorpe’ (the Randle family’s dignified detached house on Station Road) and ‘White Walls, Countesthorpe’, the detached bungalow that was the Tompkin home on Cosby Road. Sheila wore ‘a pink costume with a small hat to match’. Though there may have been those in Countesthorpe who felt deprived at missing the wedding of an attractive couple and a good wedding bash at the Conservative Club where Jack was a prominent member, there were weighty matters on people’s minds that summer. The headline on 27 July was that on that day the four-millionth man had registered for military duty in the country, and that people reading the newspapers should not throw them away, but recycle them, such was the desire to conserve resources. 44 Sheila and Maurice on their wedding day in July 1940.