Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

107 and no less of one when he had Arnold Dyson caught close in by Les Berry with his very first delivery. Sadly, there are no reports that tell us any more about the dismissal than this. After a four-over spell (4-0-13-1), Lee was taken off, and over the rest of the first day and the start of the second Jack Walsh, with seven for 53, saw off Glamorgan for 142. Johnnie Clay’s seven for 32, including a spell of six for 5 in 11 overs, restricted Leicestershire’s second innings to 123. Lee, again at No.8, was bowled by Clay for a duck. But the bad weather that had plagued the game meant that the home side had less than an hour to score the 157 needed for victory, and the game ended as a tame draw. Jack Lee was not called on to bowl any of the 13 overs of Glamorgan’s second innings. Unlike Jack Johns, Jack Lee was due to have a further chance at first-class level. He was selected for the county’s next game, at home to Middlesex, but in the end he had to turn the match down following a ‘precurrence’ of the problems that were to blight his later football career: ‘The Leicester City centre-forward had been chosen to play, but was troubled with an old knee injury and had to cry off’. 174 And despite his success with the bat in later Club and Ground matches, he never played for the county side again, not even for the Second Eleven, and he was never taken on to the county staff. Maybe the need to protect his knee for the football season had something to do with this; but for whatever reason, a potentially promising cricket career had come to a premature end. I’m afraid I don’t know how he spent his first ten years or so after retiring from football, but with a wife, Beryl, and four children, domestic duties were no doubt not insignificant. In the mid-1960s he became the groundsman at Lawrence Sheriff School at Rugby, where he stayed until his retirement in 1984. He seems to have kept his sporting history largely to himself, for as the Rugby Advertiser later wrote, ‘after 18 years of preparing pitches for others, not many people knew of Jack’s own distinguished sporting record’. 175 Instead he dedicated himself to his duties at the school, and ‘always ensured cricketers could take pride in the quality of the [school’s] square’. Taken with the fact that he spent 18 years at a school whose principal winter sport was rugby rather than soccer, can we read into this that for him, as for some other ‘other-sportsmen’ in this book, cricket held first place in his affections? Jack Lee’s disappearance into the world of groundsmanship, and his evident modesty about his past achievements, seems to fit with other memories of him. Gerald Mortimer recalls being told that he was ‘quiet and self-contained’; and he was, too, a man who never strayed far from home. Lee never received an obituary in Wisden , and his relative obscurity to cricket followers is shown by the fact that his exact date of death is not recorded in CricketArchive. In fact he died on 12 January 1995 at St Cross Hospital in Rugby, a couple of months after his 74th birthday. 174 Leicester Mercury , 12 July 1947. 175 Rugby Advertiser , 19 January 1995. First Ballers, and a Mystery