Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

originally reported that 18,000 attended – and 11,000 on Monday. Bad weather delayed the start of the third day until 2.30 and then an hour was sufficient for Leicestershire to collapse. The hors d’oeuvres over, Leicestershire could start on their championship campaign. Their yo-yo performance continued in 1948, for they recovered the three places that they had dropped the previous year, but for Maurice, it was an awful summer. There seem to be several reasons to explain this. As a free-scoring batsman, his batting style was better suited to drier wickets, but detailed analysis of this theory is handicapped by his ability to deal better with varying conditions as his career progressed. However, his best seasons were the better summers of 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1955 so the pitches were certainly an important factor. There might, however, be an additional reason. There had been substantial changes to his personal circumstances. The previous November, Sheila had given birth to Nick, giving the couple by the start of the cricket season, two sons both under 18 months old. His father had died in February, leaving him as the only son, with added responsibility for his mother. There was however the business in Countesthorpe, which Percy had run with his two brothers. Would Maurice take a role in its management? There was also his own business to consider. The move to Kettering from Huddersfield had enabled Maurice to spend more time at the indoor cricket school at Aylestone Road that he had set up with Les Berry; again, an added responsibility at a difficult time. However his football playing for Kettering was as a ‘marked man with a reputation’, rather than an irregular first-team player predominantly playing in the reserves, as was the case at Huddersfield. Moreover, the gap between the seasons was just a single day, Sunday, 25 April, hardly time to wind down and relax, and just about time to push the pram around Countesthorpe. He was also suffering for much of the season from back pains, specifically ‘fibrositis of the sciatic nerve’. Typical of Maurice, he made little of this, and the article in the Leicester Evening Mail that explained the problem at the end of August, did so in an apologetic way: ‘Maurice Tompkin is not the man to make excuses about anything, but supporters will have seen him holding his back, because the act of bending and straightening out again is especially painful. The pain would be sufficient to make life uncomfortable and a terror when you have to run, hit and throw for a living.’ In the circumstances, the article suggested, he kept going surprisingly well. Leicestershire won six championship games, the same number as in 1947 and they included a winning run of four in July and August, which happily included victories against Northamptonshire and Yorkshire. In three of these, Maurice made substantial contributions. In a summer of few highlights, the good days were exceptionally good. The early Whitsun meant that the Bank Holiday week matches against Northamptonshire and Surrey were in the middle of May. The Northamptonshire match was played under a cloudless sky. There was War and Peace, 1940 to 1949 60