Lives in Cricet No 33 - Jack Robertson and Syd Brown

20 Middlesex demonstrated that they were going to be useful replacements. And they had a new captain: the dynamic Walter Robins who believed in attacking, whether he was batting (using his feet to go down the pitch to bowlers of all speeds), bowling his widely turning wrist-spin, or fielding athletically in the covers. His captaincy would imbue the Middlesex side with the same enterprising approach, and his constant demand for attractive and entertaining cricket transformed a fairly mundane side into a winning one. In the words of David Lemmon: ‘It is doubtful if Middlesex, or any county, ever had a better captain than Walter Robins.’ A provocative statement indeed and I can hear rumblings, particularly in Surrey and Yorkshire, but he was certainly, in modern parlance, ‘up there’. One problem remained, however: the county lacked a reliable opening pair. In 1937 many counties had well-established and productive opening partnerships: champions Yorkshire had Hutton and Sutcliffe, third- place Derbyshire had Alderman and Smith, fifth-place Sussex had John Langridge and J.H.Parks. In 24 championship matches in 1937, however, Middlesex selected seven different combinations, most of them involving wicketkeeper Fred Price, a useful batsman often pressed into action at the top of the order. Fortunately an answer to the problem was not far off. Groundstaff lads were based in a room by the Nursery clock tower. Jack Young, who joined the staff in 1932, remembered it as dampish and smelling vaguely of old hymn books and with ‘no cricket gear in sight’. 21 They worked hard, while hoping for a chance to break into the county game. Reporting for duty at eight o’clock in the morning the first task was usually to haul the (very!) heavy roller backwards and forwards over the pitch. After that there was sweeping, cleaning and plenty of other jobs. Sustenance, and some kindly discipline, was provided by Mrs Swallow in a room upstairs in the old Tavern – lunch 1s 3d. On match days, wearing their smart, made-to-measure grey-flannel suits, they sold scorecards. Receiving a halfpenny for each one sold this was a profitable occupation. Denis Compton has recounted how, pooling their profits, each lad pocketed £14 6s from the Australian Test in 1934, a not inconsiderable sum compared with the standard groundstaff £2 a week . Jack got an early, albeit indirect, taste of Test cricket when, with Syd and other future Middlesex colleagues, he helped pull the heavy roller for the Test. One of the more pleasant jobs was helping to work the scorebox, although it still involved a lot of running up and down stairs changing numbers. As groundstaff lads progressed, their duties reduced and they mainly played for MCC in away fixtures, bowled to members in the nets (with the chance of a good tip), or practised themselves. Jack and Syd met and made friends with many other lads, including Denis Compton, Bill Edrich, Laurie Gray, Harry Sharp, Alec Thompson and Jack Young, all members of the side that would win the Championship just after the war. Apart from cricketing colleagues they got to know all the other Lord’s workstaff: carpenters, plumbers, painters, electricians, office staff. Like a large family, everybody knew each other by their first names. 21 The Cricketer June 1963 .