Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

110 The cricket bug had bitten. On leaving school he and some of his school team-mates played together for Bowers Boys Club against local village sides. Despite their youth – most were aged 15 or 16 – they rarely lost, because they had some very strong players who went on to become regulars at leading local club sides, and at least one of whom (apart from Bob) briefly attracted the interest of Essex C.C.C. From there, it was on to playing for Pitsea St Michael’s, before Bob decided to follow his father into the RAF. He spent three years in uniform – much of it, it seems, in an all-white uniform. His Services cricket, which included playing for RAF Middle East and for a Combined Services team on tour in Malta, was played with and against some very good players, including National Servicemen, and Bob says that playing a couple of years of cricket of this standard was ‘a huge experience’. 179 And a decisive one too. With increased confidence in his abilities, when Bob left the RAF at the age of 21 he decided to follow his erstwhile team- mate and life-long friend Ken Sandeman, the former wicketkeeper whose face he had damaged with his bowling a few years previously, by joining Westcliff-on-Sea Cricket Club. This was Trevor Bailey’s club, and the strongest side in the area. Within three weeks, Bob had graduated through Westcliff’s third and second teams to their first eleven: he retained that berth for the next 30- odd years. Selection for games for the Club Cricket Conference followed, in the first of which Bob volunteered to open the batting following a request from the captain (‘a jolly nice chap with a cravat’, as Bob recalls, with rather more than a hint of sarcasm) and promptly added 180-odd with David Evans, a Hertfordshire Minor Counties player and future right- wing MP and controversial chairman of Luton Town F.C. At much the same time – the mid-1960s – Bob was coming to the notice of the Essex club, and playing games for the seconds and for the Club and Ground eleven. He made his debut in the Second Eleven competition in a single match in 1966, and for the next three seasons – following the mid-season departure from the club of Rodney Cass – was first-choice keeper for the seconds when available. He had to fit his playing – for the Club Cricket Conference and Essex Cricket Association, as well as for the county side – around his day job in the accounts department of Marconi Ltd at Basildon, initially ‘fiddling time off’ when he could: ‘a day sick here and there’. But as time went on, the Essex keeper and captain Brian ‘Tonker’ Taylor came to see Bob as his natural reserve, and wrote to Marconi requesting extra holiday for him. Fortunately the personnel officer was ‘cricket mad, absolutely barmy for cricket, and when he got a letter from Brian Taylor he was over the moon.’ So Bob got a few more days’ holiday as a result. Tonker Taylor was renowned for his durability. Between 1961 and 1972 he played in 301 consecutive Championship matches, and during much of 179 Throughout this chapter, unattributed quotations are taken frommy interview with Bob on 13 July 2010, or from our subsequent correspondence. A Life in Cricket