Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

46 Cricket was not Jos Coulthurst’s only sport. As a schoolboy he was a promising goalkeeper, playing for the Blackburn Schoolboys team that reached the final of the Lancashire Division of the English Schools’ Shield competition in 1908, when he was only 14 years old, and presumably not yet at his full, not very substantial, adult height. Sadly, his poor eyesight prevented him taking this game further. Four years later, and again two years after that, Blackburn Rovers were to win the Football League championship; maybe a better-sighted Coulthurst might have had a chance of lasting glory in this other sporting field? After retiring from cricket he, like many others, took up bowls, and became ‘almost as venerated a figure at the Meadows in this game [as at cricket]’. Josiah Coulthurst was a Blackburn man through and through. He was born there; baptised there; married there to a Blackburn-raised girl; played almost all his cricket there despite being offered the opportunity on occasion to play elsewhere; and lived there for almost his entire life. He finally left his home town when he moved to the coast at Lytham St Annes in the later 1960s, but he was only there a year or two before dying in a geriatric hospital at Wesham, between Blackpool and Preston, on 6 January 1970, at the age of 76. He was buried at Mellor, just to the north of his home town. But he was also a cricket man through and through, justly proud of his achievements. A photograph accompanying his Blackburn Times interview in 1967, when at the age of 73 he was described as bronzed and fit as a fiddle, shows him surrounded by the proud mementoes of a life in cricket. These included his Minor Counties cap; the mounted ball with which he took his 100th wicket in 1919; a clock presented to him by the East Lancashire club; and the championship medals he won with East Lancashire and with Whalley. The accompanying report also says that ‘it [was] only recently that he threw away a bundle of old cricket stumps he had broken in two in matches.’ He maintained his interest in the East Lancashire club throughout his life, watching them regularly at Alexandra Meadows until his final years. His failure – if that is the right word – to have a longer first-class career than just his two rainy days at Old Trafford in August 1919 can be put down to various things. Primarily, these were a combination of his own choice of lifestyle, and a falling off in his form after his annus mirabilis of 1919. His selection for that one game was no fluke, and neither was it a case of the county giving a token end-of-season appearance to a promising youngster; he was, in any case, already nearer 26 than 25. He had earned it by his performances through the season, and on these performances he might perhaps have been given his county chance a little earlier in the year. Never Seen Josiah Coulthurst in later life.