Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

119 Chapter Twenty The retired cricketer Edwin had an early opportunity to get back into the game and go onto the first-class umpires list, but he turned it down. I had 24 years of travelling the country all summer, but seeing very little of Jean and the children. It is a difficult life for any woman left at home, bringing up the family and effectively running the house. It wouldn’t have been fair on any of them if I had then committed the rest of my working life to doing exactly the same. Instead he went back to Grassmoor and into a full-time job with the Coal Board that winter. He worked in the stores at Duckmanton for three years, before moving to the engineering workshops, where he built pumps until 1987. Then, like so many others from a mining background across the country, he was made redundant. Finishing work at the age of 52 hit the family hard. The work simply wasn’t out there and the family stayed afloat thanks to Jean’s earnings as a school dinner lady, once the children were old enough to enable her to go back to work. Nowadays the Professional Cricketers Association is there to help out in times of hardship, but we got no help at all. What savings we had went to keep us afloat during the year-long miners’ strike. We just learned, like many other people, to cut our cloth to suit and did without things that we regarded as non-essentials. Thankfully we had paid off our mortgage by that stage and we managed to make ends meet. When we moved back to Grassmoor from Ashgate in 1998, we managed to make a fair profit in down-sizing, which has left us comfortable since. He continued to play cricket long into retirement from the first-class game, first in the Yorkshire Council League, where he took 99 wickets at just six runs each for Norton Oaks in his first season after he left Derbyshire. He was professional there for three years and later played for Derbyshire over-50s. He played in their national County Championship triumph of 1992, before finishing in regular cricket at Chesterfield. There were also regular appearances for representative sides of the Yorkshire Council League and the Bassetlaw League, where his skills and ability continued to make him a feared and respected opponent. He continued to coach in Chesterfield until just short of his 80th birthday. He remained a popular figure and commanded respect from adults and