Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

104 Lord’s in the summer of ‘69 Edwin was the senior professional and had been on the staff since 1951. Since the end of the amateur-professional divide, the Derbyshire ‘way’, as with other counties, was to give the captaincy to the senior man on the staff. Instead, Ian Buxton was offered and accepted the captaincy. Ian was a good man and a decent cricketer, but in my opinion, Edwin should have been the next captain. I actually went to the club committee, without his knowledge, to state Edwin’s case, but to no avail. Buxton had captained the side in two drawn matches against Oxford University and Somerset in June, but Edwin had led the side against Northamptonshire in September, adding to his experience from the previous year. As an all-rounder, Buxton was a key member of the side in all forms of the game. Edwin, through no fault of his own, was not, but he knew the game inside out, as Mike Page explains: Edwin was very shrewd tactically. I had a lot of time for him, but I think the deciding thing for the committee at that time was the respective backgrounds of the players. Ian was grammar school educated and a better ‘fit’ for the role, whereas Edwin came from a mining background. Like it or not, we weren’t too far from when captains were gentleman amateurs and the role carried certain responsibilities off the field. Don’t forget that Ian had a certain stature as a footballer too and that is what the committee went for, in my opinion. Phil Russell tells a slightly different story. I don’t think Edwin was ever in the running for the captaincy on a permanent basis, simply because he didn’t play in the one day games. One-day cricket was becoming more important with the start of the John Player League and generally Edwin wasn’t considered for those matches, for whatever reason. I seem to remember that mid way-through the 1969 season we knew that Ian would be captain the following year. Fred Swarbrook felt that Edwin was the wrong man for the job for another reason. Edwin was simply too nice a person to be the team captain. That’s not at all a bad thing, but sometimes as the leader you have treat your players a little more harshly and Edwin wasn’t that sort of person. In all the time that I knew him, he remained a genuinely lovely man. It had been a chastening experience for Edwin, but he got his head down and prepared for the 1970 season. It was the club’s centenary and marked his 20th summer as a professional cricketer.