Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

Preface On either my first or second visit to the Grace Road ground in Leicester, in 1963, I purchased a yearbook. As it was towards the end of the season, I was able to buy a county yearbook and a West Indies tour guide for the princely sum of one shilling (5p). As they were my only cricket books, it was not long before I was familiar with every page. The batting records section was littered with the name M.Tompkin, and I became more interested when I learnt that he came from our village, Countesthorpe, and that when I was a small boy I had actually met him. He was one of only ten batsman who scored a thousand runs in each of the ten post-war seasons up to 1955; an illustrious list including Bill Edrich, Jack Robertson, Cyril Washbrook and Dennis Brookes, but excluding Len Hutton and Denis Compton. He played just once in the Players v Gentlemen matches at Lord’s; this was in 1955 when the professionals won by 20 runs in a match involving 16 international players. In the spring of 2009, The Wisden Cricketer ran a competition to select a post-war England team from those who had not achieved international honours, a sort of ‘Best of the Rest’ team. I was pleased to see that Maurice was on this list, though he did not make the final eleven. He was undeniably a fine batsman in an era when county cricket was well supported, a man who acknowledged his sporting talents with modesty and good humour, but above all played the game of life as well as cricket in a fair and sporting way. As I pored through the accounts of matches in which he played, I was struck that he always put the needs of his side first. Frank Chester, the Test umpire, stood in many matches in which Maurice played, and said of him: I seem to have been called upon to give him out on many occasions; he always struck me as being less concerned about the right or wrong of his dismissal than most players. He played wholeheartedly for his side, but was the first to recognise the merit of the opposition. After watching Denis Compton clout his team’s attack for a century, he said to me, ‘It’s grand to see a great player get runs, even though it’s against us’. John Arlott, in one of his post-war sketches of county cricketers, described Maurice as a ‘Pleasant, modest, fair-haired man with an upstanding style, a bold, clean, front-of-the-wicket hitter who fell only narrowly short of Test cricket. An inside forward for Huddersfield Town, he moved well in the outfield and was one of the best-liked players in the cricket of his time.’ 5