Lives in Cricket No 22 - Jack Mercer

11 staying in the house. The only thing he couldn’t conjure up was money, and Jack was regularly hoping to improve his lot by having a flutter on the horses. After his dreadful experiences in the Great War – lying wounded in a crater for two days before being invalided home with shell-shock and shrapnel wounds – he was rather miffed about the very small amount of money he received from his Army pension. After receiving his campaign medals in the 1920s, Jack went before a War Office pension board to argue for an increase in the amount of money he received. After listening to Jack’s reminiscences about events on the Somme and hearing of his circumstances, the chairman of the Board replied that Jack couldn’t be too badly off as, at the time, he was second in the national bowling averages. Jack immediately replied that, without the injuries, he would have been top of the bowling lists! Jack joined Northamptonshire as their coach in 1947, but he had been coaching for several years before that, passing on tips to the young Glamorgan bowlers in the 1930s and spending time with the county’s coach Bill Hitch, as they groomed the next generation of bowlers. In the late 1930s, he was instrumental in recommending the bowling talents of Wilf Wooller to the captain, Maurice Turnbull. During the winter months, he often coached in Australia and the West Indies. In particular, he spent several winters in Jamaica where he played a major part in the early career of one of the island’s greatest cricketing sons, Alf Valentine, the left-arm spinner who became the first West Indian bowler to take over a hundred Test wickets. Back in the winter of 1948/49, the bespectacled youngster was a virtual unknown, living in a working-class suburb of Kingston. Jack was soon impressed by the amount of sharp spin Alf could impart from his long fingers. The pair duly spent many long hours in the nets, or on any patch of spare land in Kingston, with Jack helping the young spinner to perfect his skills and craft. In 1963 Jack became Northamptonshire’s first-team scorer, a position he filled until 1981 before spending a couple of seasons in a similar capacity with their second eleven. His new duties allowed him to retain close contact with cricketers young and old, as well as journalists, with the scribes often frequenting the same area on the ground as the scorers. If bad weather was interfering with play, the press box would come alive with stories of yesteryear as Jack delighted the hacks with his tales. It also gave Jack a new and eager audience for his card tricks, with his scoring colleagues – sometimes frustrated by his loss of mathematical accuracy – now left wide-eyed in amazement by one of Jack’s special tricks. Indeed, he was one of the most popular scorers on the circuit with a cry of ‘everything’s approximate’ as he answered a reporter’s enquiry. These were the days, of course, when scorers used books and pencils, rather than laptops, printers and other electronic devices used by the current crop of county notchers. After lunch, Jack could doze off for a few overs – something that would be nigh impossible in the digital era of scoring. But Jack’s colleagues the length and breadth of the country were more than happy for him to copy up quietly a few overs later, having woken up from Introduction