Lives in Cricket No 27 - CB Llewellyn

86 Accrington at 23.21 and Chadwick with 318 at 16.73. As a bowler he took 101 wickets at 10.29; Pollard took 39 at 9.82 and Brown 46 at 12.71. The other five bowlers took 28 wickets between them. Above Buck in the league batting averages were three amateurs, and one professional, Vic Norbury, a former member of the Hampshire staff who made a long and successful career in the leagues up to the 1930s. That season he scored 760 runs for East Lancashire and captured 109 wickets at 8.99 apiece. Cec Parkin headed the bowling averages with 123 victims at 8.03. Other professionals above Buck in the bowling line-up were the former Lancashire players Alex Kermode and William Cook, and Henry Smoker, whose brief career with Hampshire echoed Norbury’s. In almost every side which Accrington opposed at that time were other well-known pros from the county game: Emmott Robinson, who was to play for Yorkshire between 1919 and 1931; A.W.Hallam who helped Nottinghamshire to win the County Championship in 1907; Tom Lancaster of Lancashire; Harry Hartington of Yorkshire and George Gill of Leicestershire and Somerset. There were also Helm Spencer of Lancashire and Glamorgan and Walter Lees, the former Surrey fast bowler. This phase of Buck’s career was drawing to its close. In 1916, the Lancashire League dispensed with professionals for the duration of the war; Buck, whose living was cricket, looked elsewhere for a theatre for his talents. Without him, Accrington still headed the League for the third year in succession; then for 1917 and 1918, the League was suspended altogether. Buck did not lose touch with Accrington, however, and the club persuaded him and many other Test and county players (and a crowd of 4,000) to turn out for a charity match on 6 September 1916. Playing – at last – for ‘An England XI’, he top- scored with a run-out 50 in a close-run match against a side styled ‘Lancashire and Yorkshire’.