Lives in Cricket No 40 - Edwin Smith

38 for six months of the year. I think most of the players from that background appreciated that running around in the daylight and fresh air was a much better option. Edwin, in common with most of the Derbyshire professionals, earned around £400 a season until he was capped. Before he got to that stage, his spell on the ground staff had opened his eyes to the lot of the would-be professional. We used to have to erect the wooden tiered seating that was transported around the grounds before every game and if there were nets, we used to put them up as well. On a Monday morning Walter Goodyear cut and prepared four nets at Derby, two of them shaved for the spinners and the others with more grass for the seam bowlers. Then we’d brush them and they’d be rolled and cut again before use. We would do a range of chores around the ground and then practice ourselves. Finally, between 5.30pm and 7.30pm, we had to bowl at the members who turned up for a 20-minute net. Edwin’s shoulders start to shake and a chuckle breaks out, as he remembers some of those sessions from long ago: Oh, we had some laughs! There was one member, a chap named Potter, who turned up every night on a push bike with his cricket kit. He even turned up one evening with his arm in a cast, having broken it. Keith Mohan and myself were egging Harold Rhodes on to bowl fast and hit his other one, so we could get the next night off! They used to get 20 minutes of batting each. Some of them were quite good and I remember some of the Repton public school lads came down. There was also a policeman named Alec Macbeth, who was a big chap and hit the ball very hard. I used to toss the ball up to him and he’d hit me for miles. I worked out quickly that if I took my time on the way for the ball and back, I’d only have to bowl one or two deliveries at him ... At the end of it all, of course, was the journey home that I mentioned earlier, so they were long, but happy days. Progression from the ground staff was the goal, but the young players had to work hard, with tough taskmasters in groundsman Walter Goodyear and coach Denis Smith. Neither suffered fools gladly, but they had jobs to do and worked hard. The two men were good friends, as Walter explains: Denis and I got on brilliantly. We always did when he was a player, but when he became coach we had a lot of fun. He always had his pipe on the go – you rarely saw him without it – and we never had a cross word. I always knew where he was from the plume of smoke from that pipe! I remember one time he broke my finger by accident and I had to go to the hospital to get it splinted. The next day I was lifting something and Being a professional