Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

45 using his wrist to move the ball off the pitch when conditions were right, and varied his flight as well as his pace. At League level, at least, these skills, together with his great accuracy, brought him a high proportion of ‘bowled’ dismissals: 65 of his 101 League victims in 1919 were out bowled, and a further seven were lbw. Against Haslingden in June 1919 – many of his finest performances seem to have been against Haslingden – he bowled six batsmen in an innings with a seventh lbw, and he secured four bowled dismissals in an innings on seven other occasions that season. He was also a disciplined bowler, and claimed never to have been no-balled in his life. Most reports suggest that his pace was seriously quick: ‘His terrific pace proved deadly’ … ‘[He] bowls fast left, comes from a great height, and can make the ball bounce on any wicket with life in it’ … ‘I can picture even now that erect, bespectacled left-hander with the leap as he delivered, 68 and the hurtling speed’ … ‘Jos Coulthurst was fast by any standards, and he is still proud of it. He recalls that Neville Cardus once wrote that he was one of the fastest left-arm bowlers of the day – this at the time of Nobby Clark and Bill Voce. And in Harold Larwood’s early days he once told Jos, “There’s very little in it between McDonald, you and me”’ … ‘A genuine fast bowler, he had a distinctive action with a kangaroo leap at the end of a very long run’. He also had a habit of plucking at his left trouser leg before going into his delivery, leaving his flannels thin on his left knee. ACS sources, however, describe him as only ‘fast-medium’. On the basis of the above extracts, that would seem to understate his pace. And yet it has to be reported that two of his wickets for Lancashire II in 1922 were ‘stumped’ dismissals, by two different wicketkeepers in different matches. If they could stand up to him, maybe he wasn’t quite so fast after all? Outside cricket Coulthurst’s reluctance to make cricket his career arose because of his commitment to a different life. Even before the First World War he had become involved with the Blackburn branch of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows, a mutual organisation set up to protect and care for its members in the days before the welfare state. He was the secretary of its Blackburn district for many years, and received an inscribed silver cigar case ‘as a mark of esteem’ from the Darwen branch in 1934. 69 Later he became, in the words of his newspaper interview in 1967, ‘a Ministry official’, the ambiguity of which phrase it has not been possible to resolve. Was this a post within the Oddfellows organisation, or a civil service appointment? He was a family man. Jos Coulthurst married Jeanette Watt Forrest in 1927, and they had a daughter, also Jeanette, in 1933. Later, the family’s notice of his death described him as a ‘very devoted husband and dear father’, and there seems no reason to doubt that he benefited from a happy and loving homelife throughout his almost 43 years of marriage. 68 This ‘leap’ no doubt explains how a bowler only 5ft 7½in tall could deliver ‘from a great height’. 69 The cigar case was auctioned in Cumbria in November 2007, with an estimated price of £80 to £120. Never Seen