Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

103 Jack first played for a county eleven in August 1904 at the age of 18, when he turned out for Players of Glamorgan against the Gentlemen of the county. Opening the batting (not a position he would remotely challenge for later in his career) he scored 22 and, surprisingly in light of later events, did not bowl. Then all is silent for 16 years. Throughout this period Glamorgan participated in the Minor Counties championship, but it was not until their final year in that competition, 1920, that Jack made his debut at this level. Even then it was in only a single game, against Devon at Neath in July, in which he made a pair and returned figures of 4-0-16-0 in the only innings in which he bowled. Not exactly an eye-catching performance. Unsurprisingly he did not play for Glamorgan in their first season of first- class cricket in 1921, when they started well but soon fell away as the pressure told on an ageing team. 1922 was no better. For these first two years Glamorgan never had anything approaching a settled side: in 1921 they used 29 players in 18 Championship matches, and in 1922, 38 in 22, twelve of whom played only a single game. One of these dozen players was Jack Johns, called into the game against Somerset at Cardiff Arms Park beginning on 15 July to replace the long-serving but out-of-form bowler Jack Nash. By now Johns was three months short of his 37th birthday, but this was still only a little older than the side’s average age, despite the inclusion of two players yet to reach the age of 25. Among his other team- mates were Harry Creber, aged 50, Stamford Hacker, aged 45, and three others aged between 38 and 41. Rain interruptions marred the first day of the game, and turned what started as a good wicket into one that was ‘exceedingly tricky’, according to the Western Mail . Glamorgan were bowled out for 99 soon after tea, Johns making 1* at No.9. He was then entrusted with the first over of Somerset’s reply, and with his first ball dismissed Sydney Rippon to what the Western Mail called a ‘wonderfully smart piece of stumping’ by Norman Riches – not a specialist keeper by any means, though rather more than just an occasional one. 169 What Riches was doing standing up to the first ball of the innings, bowled by an unknown bowler on an uncertain pitch, we can only guess; and because contemporary newspapers are silent on the subject, we can only guess too as to the exact nature of the dismissal. Glamorgan expert Andrew Hignell has suggested to me, plausibly, that Johns began with an off-cutter to the right-handed Rippon, and his first delivery gave Riches the opportunity for a fine leg-side stumping. But there is no contemporary source than can confirm that this was indeed the way the wicket fell. In his fourth over Johns took another wicket when he bowled Jack MacBryan, also for a duck. His opening spell was described by the Western Mail as ‘admirable’, but this was his last first-class wicket. Somerset struggled on to 77 all out with Johns returning a respectable 11-3-29-2, and then dismissed Glamorgan for 139 – at one stage they were 17 for five. 169 Only B.N.Khanna (Northern India 1927/28) can also claim a stumping dismissal off the first ball he ever bowled in first-class cricket. In Khanna’s case, it was the only ball he bowled in first-class cricket. First Ballers, and a Mystery