Lives in Cricket No 3 - George Duckworth

first such ode was placed in Yorkshire, for Stanley Holloway had served with a Yorkshire regiment in World War I and was familiar with the accent. But the stereotype was not right. The Tyke ‘persona’, real and imagined, was more brusque and remorseless, whereas the Red Rose caricature allowed for a more contemplative and capricious edge. Albert Ramsbottom and his parents, irked by the cost of the Widnes to Runcorn ferry, intrepidly attempted a pedestrian crossing: The further they paddled, the deeper it got, But they wouldn’t give in once t’begun. It’s the spirit that’s made Lancashire what she is; They’d sooner be drownded than done. Forty years later Peter Tinniswood, born at one and reared at the other end of the Mersey, presented the Brandon family, in novels and then television form. His Uncle Mort and Les Brandon were elaborate reincarnations of Mr Ramsbottom, with their measured, watchful, ruminative take on the bizarreness of the human condition, as lived in a South Lancashire urban settlement, such as Warrington, now, of course, a unitary authority within the unlikely bounds of bosky Cheshire. Cleverly, the actor Robin Bailey, creator of the Uncle Mort role, doubled as the Brigadier, when Peter Tinniswood’s zany Tales from the Long Room were adapted for television. As an old school friend of the author, I was interested in how, like myself, he had been fascinated by the vestiges of the Sam Small semblance in the immediate post-war Lancashire eleven. The Brigadier makes continuous references to Dick Pollard (himself a jaunty pianist, very useful on the evenings of away matches) and Malcolm Hilton (himself a droll reciter of the Holloway canon, ditto the away matches) and others, but it is Winston Place, who might be described as the Robb Wilton of Lancashire cricket and who was an adept at the ancient Lancastrian folk-game of starting an argument and sidling away when it became heated, who really caught Peter Tinniswood’s eye. The Brigadier, for example, overwhelmed by the indoor batting school of Blofeld Castle, was moved to ‘repaint its walls with scenes in the life of Winston Place, including ‘the Late Cutting of D.V.P.Wright.’ Indeed, Winston Place, along with Robin Bailey, is a dedicant of More Tales from the Long Room . The Background 19