Lives in Cricket No 30 - MJK Smith

109 Hotelier of Wootton Court his rags-to-riches story and his ultimate success made him a favourite with the media, and the game grew in his slipstream. Squash became the fashionable yuppie sport of the time, and its inherent attraction soon embraced a less elitist following. The game was thirsting for places where the new enthusiasts could play. Dedicated squash clubs opened across the country, tennis and cricket clubs added squash sections, and local authorities made sure that the game was available in the many new sports centres that were opening around this time. The new- found popularity of squash began to attract entrepreneurs: no longer were courts confined to members’ clubs as businessmen saw them as a way of making money. For a few brief years in the late 1960s and early 1970s the market for new courts boomed, and one of the first to see the opportunity that squash offered was Derrick Robins. By 1968 he was already widely known as the chairman of Coventry City FC and his most notable involvement with cricket, after playing a couple of matches for Warwickshire in 1947, had been in running the Eastbourne Festival. It was there, in 1971, that he became the oldest first- class cricketer since the war when he led his own team against the Indian tourists. A larger than life character, Robins had started his Banbury Buildings firm with a cement mixer in a field and turned it into a major public company. With a traditional product range of garages and sheds, the company now brought to the market prefabricated squash courts that could be erected quickly and inexpensively. At this time traditional squash courts suffered from two major problems: condensation on the walls and finding a plaster that would stand up to the constant hammering of the ball. The Banbury court, consisting of light aggregate concrete panels, answered these problems. The light aggregate absorbed condensation, and concrete was tougher than a plastered wall. Robins needed a man to help sell his courts. And who better to represent the company in the world of sport than a former England cricket captain? Mike joined Robins, but he soon found that the courts were difficult to sell. ‘I’ve always felt that they came across as prefabricated as opposed to custom-built,’ he admits. ‘They didn’t fit in at all with architects.’ Hence Banbury had little prospect of success where courts were planned as an integral part of a more extensive sports complex. Moreover, a fundamental weakness of a Banbury court was its asbestos sheet