Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

12 From the hills of Bedfordshire … For, believe it or not, there are four other cricketers who made a 90 on debut and then never played at first-class level again. 5 None scored anywhere near as many runs as Glenn Wilkinson, but surely all deserve their achievement to be acknowledged, even if it does have an element of ‘so near and yet so far’ about it. Though Glenn had hoped at one point to make cricket his career, the same cannot be said of the only Englishman from among the four. Arthur Bertram Poole , generally known as ‘AB’, or perhaps ‘Bertie’ to those who knew him really well, was a career local government officer, who rose through the ranks at Bedfordshire County Council to become an assistant county surveyor by the time he retired. But - as we shall see - despite his long service, it would seem that his life at County Hall had to be fitted around his sporting priorities rather than the other way round. Poole was born in Bedford to a settled local family. He arrived in the world on 30 June 1907 (baptismal and other records confirm this date, rather than 30 June 1906 as given on his death certificate), the second son, and third child, of Arthur William Hoare Poole and his wife Bertha; they were to have another son and daughter over the next four years. AB’s first home was in a modest, mid-Victorian terraced house, Missenden Villa, close to Bedford Midland railway station. His father, like his own father before him, also worked in local government. Both father and grandfather rose to become the county’s chief inspector of weights and measures, and AB’s father was famed within his profession for having produced, in 1947, the second edition of the standard work on the subject (‘The Law relating to Weights and Measures’, originally compiled by one G.A.Owen). There are two major public schools in Bedford, and AB went to Bedford Modern (alma mater of A.O.Jones, Geoff Millman and, more recently, Monty Panesar) rather than Bedford School (which can claim Robin Boyd- Moss and Alastair Cook). Wisden shows him in their batting averages in 1923, when he scored 253 runs at an average of 25.30 in the summer in which he turned 16, and rather less successfully with 163 runs at 14.82 the following year. Nothing startling here, and I have been unable to trace the chain of events that led to him taking his place in Bedfordshire’s minor county eleven for the first time just a year later, on 30 July 1925 when one month past his 18th birthday. He began his county career inauspiciously with two ducks, in separate matches (away and home) against Oxfordshire, and improved just a little with scores of two and three not out against Leicestershire seconds in his third and last match of the season. He was passed over by the county for the 1926 season, and appeared in only two 5 In addition, getting on for 200 cricketers have scored a 90 on debut and then have played again - among them the likes of Ian Craig, Paul Collingwood and Shiv Chanderpaul. Pakistani Tanvir Razzaq actually played innings of 98 and 90 (run out!) in his debut match, for WAPDA against Lahore City in 1984/85; he eventually reached the only century of his 39-match career in his 22nd innings. Rashid Moshin was 99 not out when - after a last-wicket stand of 27 - he ran out of partners in the first innings of his debut match, for Services against Himachal Pradesh in the Ranji Trophy in 1993/94. This remained the highest score of his six-match first-class career. So close