Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

home side chasing 192 to win. Jim Sims made the match his own by taking seven for 38, and a Middlesex victory by 100 runs. Maurice banked his thousand runs for the season during the match against Kent at Maidstone, achieving the feat on 20 July, the earliest in the season he had achieved it up to that point in his career. The mood in the club, though, was becoming ugly. Leicestershire had still only won one championship match, and the members were becoming restless. The committee convened an emergency meeting in late July. Two decisions resulted. Firstly, the county would do all they could to recruit ready-made players from other counties. Second, players who had not played so far this season would be given an opportunity. In relation to the first point, the club were very keen to register Guy Willatt, the Nottinghamshire amateur but then living in Scotland, with the idea that he might become secretary or captain or both. The MCC would not, however, allow him to start qualification until he took up residence in the county, and this never happened. The committee also decided to offer the captaincy for 1950 to Symington, which he rejected before the end of the season. The team though were obviously motivated by the committee’s decision, for in the following match they defeated Surrey. A close match throughout, Maurice made the top score when he made 89 in the first innings, achieved in less than two hours and in which he shared a partnership of 127 with Les Berry. Surrey’s final-innings dismissal was due to Jack Walsh taking seven for 113. Consistency rather than large scores marked Maurice’s batting summer, and he did not complete his first championship hundred until the Lancashire match at Blackpool in August. He scored a ‘masterly’ 111 in four hours out of 164 scored while he was at the crease, being ninth out. His second championship hundred came ten days later, against Worcestershire, which included a run-a-minute century partnership with Vic Jackson. In neither match, though, was this sufficient to help the team secure a draw. There were three cricket festivals taking place in the first week in September, and from the teams appearing, the Kingston event appears to have been the least representative. Maurice was playing for the North against the South, and as both Geoff Whittaker and Tony Lock from Surrey were playing for the North, the organisers either cannot have had an accurate knowledge of geography or had difficulty recruiting a team. On the second morning, Maurice, batting at four, put on 228 with Whittaker in only 115 minutes, reaching his hundred in 110 minutes, and in total he batted for 130 minutes, hitting one six and fourteen fours. For the only time in his career, he scored a hundred before lunch, though this fact appears to have escaped the eagle eye of Roy Webber, the noted cricket statistician of the time, and consequently not then reported in the record books. It is also likely that it was Maurice’s fastest first-class hundred. War and Peace, 1940 to 1949 65