Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

11 Early days close was indicative of the talent often present in such small communities. Edwin’s football effectively finished when he joined Derbyshire, although he made a few appearances in local football in his mid-20s, while recovering from a leg injury. Such later team mates as Ian Hall, Ian Buxton and Ray Swallow made a name for themselves in both sports, but Edwin modestly admits that he ‘wasn’t as good as them’. What were his memories of school yard and street cricket before he joined the village club? We used to play as often as we could. There was usually a bat to be had, but we had to use our initiative for balls. We often used ‘coconut’ balls – the wooden ones that people threw at the coconuts on the fairground. We would cover them with black tape and play until the tape came off and then cover them again. Occasionally we got our hands on a cricket ball, but it was usually one that had been deemed unfit for use at the cricket club. If you were lucky there would still be some leather on it and we would again tape it up, but sometimes there was just the string covering the ball and the tape would come out again. We also used the old composition balls, or ‘compos’ as we called them. I broke a few windows hitting them over the years! A move to a bigger house at 20 Birkin Lane in 1942, when he was eight, exposed young Edwin to organised cricket. The house was across the road from the cricket ground, which provided the ideal playground for a sports-mad youngster. The road was swapped for the outfield as he and his friends spent many happy hours there. A typically boyish thing caused a setback when he contracted pneumonia, a potentially fatal illness that was more dangerous at that time before antibiotics. I’d been rolling around in wet grass and I suppose the houses themselves were fairly damp too, so I didn’t get dried off, or change my clothes. I was seriously ill for weeks and at one stage the local doctor and nurse spent a couple of nights with me, because they were concerned that I wouldn’t pull through. I spent weeks in my bedroom and missed quite a lot of school as a result. This was in wartime, when Chesterfield and district got away quite lightly in comparison to other areas. The German air force tried to bomb the Horns Bridge at Chesterfield, which carried three railway lines up, down and across the country, but they failed because the town kept an impressively strict blackout. Near to the bridge was the Chesterfield Tube Works, which produced shell casings and barrels for guns, mortars and other wartime components, so damage to either could have impaired the British war effort. A few bombs were dropped in the area around Grassmoor, but these were largely ‘ditched’ by aircraft returning to Germany after bombing elsewhere, the larger industrial areas of Sheffield and Derby bearing the brunt.