Lives in Cricet No 33 - Jack Robertson and Syd Brown

115 New Partners room could be improved. The matter would be discussed with the MCC Secretary!) At the end of the season, with an eye to the future, Middlesex offered Jack the position of joint coach in succession to J.W.Hearne. He would be paid an additional £250 per annum, plus expenses, and arrangements would be made for him to attend an MCC Advanced Certificate Coaching Course at Lilleshall. 157 By 1958 Jack was the only member of the 1947 championship-winning side playing regularly, although Compton came back for three matches and Edrich played half a season’s matches, neither with any great success. After five years Edrich had handed the captaincy to John Warr, another very able captain as well as being a man of many parts. 158 As a cricketer he is unfortunately remembered as being a surprising, and unsuccessful, choice for the MCC tour to Australia in 1950/51, rather than a very good quick bowler who eventually took nearly a thousand wickets in a twelve-year first-class career. Middlesex started well, but eventually finished tenth, a reasonable performance given the changes the side were going through. Jack’s playing contract had been renewed for another three years and he repaid the county’s confidence: it was an atrociously wet summer but, with 1,467 runs in the Championship at nearly 35 runs an innings, he easily topped the Middlesex averages. 159 In his first match of the season he went past 30,000 first-class runs, joining Washbrook as the only other player still appearing regularly who had got that far. Obviously the Test selectors had long forgotten about him but Bill Edrich, writing just after England had been hammered 4-0 in Australia in 1958/59, said that even aged 41 Jack should have been on the tour. 160 He could not have performed much worse than the openers who went. 161 He batted with great consistency, making ten fifties and rarely failing to reach double figures. A final career century eluded him. Tantalisingly he fell one short against Sussex in the traditional Bank Holiday match before a Lord’s crowd severely reduced by a London Transport bus strike. Conditions were not easy. The pitch gave the quick bowlers plenty of help and twenty wickets fell on the first day. Sussex didn’t last long: all out 79 before lunch. Middlesex headed this score by 110 runs, but apart from Jack, who seemed to be playing on a different pitch, only three batsmen reached double figures, Dennis Baldry second top-scoring with 29. The Times described Jack’s elegant innings 157 Hearne was appointed as a talent scout, a position he would hold until 1960. Robertson and Sims would remain joint coaches until 1961 when, for reasons of economy, Sims’ position was terminated. Sims would eventually become county scorer, a post he held until his death in a Canterbury hotel the night before a pre-season friendly with Kent. 158 David Lemmon thought that he led the team with a ‘thoughtful gaiety that made Middlesex an attractive side again’. 159 He had reached a 1,000 runs in each season since 1939. Only Dennis Brookes, who had done so each season since 1937 and would do so again in 1959, had a better run. Just over a year older than Jack, Brookes’ career record was very similar and, with just one Test appearance, he must also have wondered why more honours didn’t come his way. Washbrook reached a 1,000 runs in every season between 1935 and 1958, except for 1957 when he fell fifty short. 160 Edrich, Bill, Round the Wicket , Frederick Muller, 1959. 161 Injury-hit England used four openers in the series. Only one partnership passed 30, and only Peter Richardson with 68 in the Fifth Test made a fifty.