Lives in Cricket No 20 - Maurice Tompkin

Chapter Seven Senior Professional A successful benefit was critically important to the future finances of a professional cricketer. Though Leicestershire benefits were always at the lower end of the county scale, a player could still receive five or six times his annual salary, and it was also tax free, courtesy of the House of Lords’ 1927 decision in the case Seymour v Reed. The Leicestershire team that had resumed cricket after the Second World War was growing old together, and there were benefits or testimonials in every year from 1949 to 1958. Perhaps because of Leicestershire’s notoriously low gates – they were the lowest in the country in 1956, and only three had lower gates in the successful summer of 1953 – Maurice made the novel request to the club committee that, rather than be allocated a specific match, he should receive the third-best gate of the 1954 season. This the committee rejected in favour of the match against Lancashire at the end of the August Bank Holiday week. He started planning for it early in the year. As evidence of his following in the city and county, he had as fund patrons Sir Geoffrey and Lady Isobel Barnett. Sir Geoffrey had been Lord Mayor of Leicester during coronation year and had received a knighthood recognising all the extra work that being Lord Mayor during that year had brought. His wife, a doctor, achieved celebrity status as a panellist on the television quiz show What’s My Line? and, more seriously, on the Friday evening radio programme Any Questions? Leicestershire’s two doyen cricket fundraisers, Billy Butler and Sam Norman, did the real business of the benefit committee, with input from Jack Walsh. At some stage early in the year Maurice bought a new car, a black Morris Cowley, LAY 140, which replaced his Humber Snipe, in preparation for his travels around Leicestershire, carrying the fund-raising paraphernalia, not to mention players who did not have cars. The benefit was indeed the largest figure achieved by a Leicestershire beneficiary to that date, and was to remain so until beaten by Maurice Hallam in 1962. The season was full of evening and Sunday matches against local sides. In fact Maurice was away playing for MCC at Lord’s when one of the big early events, a whist drive organised by the county supporters’ club, was held at the de Montfort Hall in Leicester. The magnificent sum of £120 was raised, and 676 people attended. As Sam Norman wrote in a thank-you letter to a supporter, ‘this effort was an unqualified success’. 92