Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

Leicestershire’s few home wartime matches were played mainly at Grace Road. To make the venue absolutely clear, the Leicestershire scorer, Sammy Coe wrote ‘Grace Road, Aylestone’ in the scorebook, and a great fuss was made of the return when the first match was scheduled for August 1941. The Leicester Mercury pointed out to its readers that the county were returning to their old haunts and, with C.J.B.Wood as acting secretary, Sammy Coe as scorer and John King as umpire, they had three men present who had played in the last first-class matches played on the ground in 1900. Also scheduled to be playing was Maurice Tompkin in what would have been his only match for the county during the war. Sadly, it rained, the match was abandoned, and the playing return had to wait until the following summer by which time Maurice was abroad. By April 1945, the club had an agreement from the City Council that they could use the City Boys’ School playing field during the Whitsun and summer holidays. They had rejected the idea that the club should rent it. The club were also allowed to use it on occasions such as the tourist match which was generally played in early May. The City Council perhaps appreciated that the visit of the touring team was good for the city. Grace Road, with extra stands, was certainly the only ground in the county that could accommodate crowds that watched the Australians in the years after the war. For the next twenty years, the pattern was eight matches at Grace Road, and five or six matches at grounds in the market towns around the county. Grace Road was never seen as an ideal venue. The alternatives widely discussed included the Abbey Oval, just to the north of the city centre, used just the once by the county in their war time matches, and the Agricultural Showground site, situated between Grace Road and Aylestone Road, which became the Sports Centre that saw the cycling World Championships of 1970, a venue favoured by the former secretary and noted innovator, S.C.Packer. By the end of August 1945, the county had drawn up a list of nine ‘first-grade’ players who they felt were going to form the basis of the post- war team. These were Les Berry, H.A.Smith, F.T.Prentice, George Dawkes, Jim Sperry, Maurice Tompkin, N.F.Armstrong, G.S.Watson and Gerry Lester. Four second-grade players were identified: Cyril Drake, Vic Munden, Richard West and the West Indian, Fred Gibson. It should be noted that Norman Armstrong would have been 53 in May 1946. Haydon Smith, though a fine bowler in his day, would have been opening the attack at the age of 45. In the end, neither played. Smith wanted £450 for the season – he had been offered £300 – and died just two years later with heart problems. Maurice arrived home from India in August, and played cricket for the Leicester Nomads once again, finishing top of their batting averages with 201 runs in seven innings, including one century, a score of precisely 100 against Kibworth, in one of the last games in September. The last Leicestershire match was on 18August, a one-day affair against Derbyshire which they managed to lose by an innings, scoring just 126 runs in 76 overs and losing twenty wickets, a ‘good one for Maurice to miss’. Despite this, 46 War and Peace, 1940 to 1949