Lives in Cricket No 27 - CB Llewellyn

89 and 1910, and were to achieve that success in 1916, 1917 and 1919 when enjoying Buck’s services. He and Parkin helped the club to rise from eleventh to third place in the League. It was in this phase of his career that Buck came to the rapt attention of J.M.Kilburn, later a longstanding cricket correspondent of the Yorkshire Post . He wrote in his book Overthrows how on summer Saturdays as a boy he went to watch Llewellyn, adventuring on foot or by tram through the territory of the Bradford Cricket League. In schoolboy games, or in his dreams, he played as Llewellyn. He described his hero as a spin bowler of slow-medium pace. ‘His action … was in the orthodox mould with smooth approach, delivery and follow-through, the arm classically high’. Kilburn had the impression, quite correctly, that Llewellyn was an early bowler of the chinaman. Wilfred Rhodes, Kilburn noted, remembered him as an orthodox spinner, looking ‘like a rather sunburned English player’. Kilburn saw Buck as the ‘Sir Lancelot’ of cricketers. Once he hit a six at Lidget Green, the ball carrying not only boundary line, and seating, but also a stone wall, 12 or 15 feet high, separating the cricket ground from a main road. The return of the ball was long delayed. Following signals and shouting from beyond the wall, Llewellyn ran, scrambled over the wall and dropped into the road; he found the ball had ‘pitched in a perambulator occupied by a baby’. Neither child nor mother was injured, but Buck would hit no more sixes that day. As time went by, a number of teams represented the League against scratch sides, such as Yorkshire, and an England Eleven in games played over two days in mid-August 1917, and, a year later, Captain P.F.Warner’s XI. In these and other matches, which probably constituted the highest standard of cricket played in the north of England during the period 1914 to 1918, Buck did not shine. This was a big disappointment for him as in these matches played before huge crowds, the opposition was almost entirely made up of first-class players. He did not take more than one wicket in an innings and his highest score was 31. In the League, Undercliffe’s performances varied: they were third in 1916, fourteenth in the following year, then fourth in 1918. When the Bradford League XI played that two-day match at Park Avenue in mid-August 1917, more than 4,000 enthusiasts paid £102, which went to war charities, and all this came from the first day as rain then intervened. The Bradford League