Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

Graveney and Willie Watson, both selected for England in the crucial summer of 1951. Maurice’s own view of his batting also supports the desire to be bold. One of his neighbours in Countesthorpe rebuked him for being so aggressive from the start of his innings, and received the reply: ‘Cricket is a game between bat and ball. If you let the bowler tie you down you will never get any runs. You have to try and knock him off his length.’ Returning to Leicestershire, who were struggling again this season, must have been hard. Just when he needed some large innings to continue to press his claim, he had a run of low scores. Leicestershire’s form was pretty bad too, losing five of their next nine matches, including innings defeats by Sussex and Glamorgan. At a time when he needed to demonstrate what a splendid fielder he still was, he developed fibrositis in his right shoulder and was unable to bat in the Leicestershire second innings against Glamorgan. There was little point in making the injury worse by batting in a lost cause. Neither captain thought much of the wicket at Loughborough, Wilf Wooller stated that the team would be ‘home on Monday’, Charlie Palmer was more diplomatic and called it ‘astonishing’. The county’s return to Hinckley after 14 years should have been a time of great celebration for the South Leicestershire town. Maurice though had weightier matters on his mind. The four-day rest had allowed him to recover from his injury, but Charlie Palmer was ill with flu, and did not confirm that he was playing until the morning of the game. Leicestershire’s opponents, Middlesex, were lacking Denis Compton, playing for England at Lord’s, but could still boast a side containing batsmen as fine as Jack Robertson and Bill Edrich, and slow bowlers Jim Sims and Jack Young who had played for England. Lying in a Royal Infirmary Hospital bed in Leicester, was three-year-old Nick Tompkin, very seriously ill. After the war, Leicestershire had lacked a satisfactory base in the south of the county. The Hinckley cricket and rugby clubs had been given 10 acres of ground on the Coventry Road just five years before, and they had spent £5,000 transforming the field into a sports ground, with a pavilion and clubhouse. The game against Middlesex was therefore a big occasion. Club members spent many weeks making preparations for the event, and their finishing touches were only completed the day before the match. It was therefore an important local affair which generated a particular expectation that Maurice should do well. In 1950, there were over forty hosiery manufacturing businesses in the town, and had not Maurice’s father and uncles also been in this line? Royalty would not have attracted more attention than the Middlesex team over this weekend. They arrived on the Friday evening on the 7.32 pm train, and fans swarmed onto the platform when the train carrying the Middlesex team arrived. They were greeted by Leslie Compton and Jim Sims, who had travelled by road and had just ‘slipped into the Railway Hotel for a quick one’. Though the weather was dull, it was fine enough to encourage a good crowd estimated at 5,000, who eschewed the counter-attraction of a Lady Years of Plenty, 1950 to 1953 73