Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

17 So it was back to the more familiar round of the Minor Counties competition for Poole for the rest of 1936. He could not immediately recapture the form of the previous year, making two ducks, and a total of seven runs, in his first four innings of the season. With two matches of the season to go his aggregate stood at 73 runs, made at an average of 10.42. But those last two matches changed everything. Scores of 85 and 49 against Cambridgeshire in the match beginning on 20 August took his season’s aggregate over the 200 mark; and he then proceeded to more than double it with the innings of his life against Oxfordshire at the un-Oxfordshire-sounding Northern Aluminium Company Ground at Banbury, starting on 24 August. His 234 in Bedfordshire’s only innings was made in 192 minutes out of 360, and included 29 fours and five sixes. Three of the sixes came in one over from slow left-armer Alf Heymeson, the first of them bringing up his century, in 95 minutes. The entire innings was played on the first day of the [two- day] match, on which 589 runs were scored (Bedfordshire 493 for three declared, Oxon 96 for six); on the second day Oxfordshire were able to save the game after following on. Poole’s score of 234 remains the highest ever made for Bedfordshire in the Minor Counties competition (in their 106 seasons in the competition, they have recorded only one other double-century), and was at the time the eighth-highest innings ever played for any county in the competition 9 . He batted at number three in this innings, and shared partnerships of 138 for the second wicket with opener Ernest Dynes (who made 53), and 222 for the third wicket with his captain Roger Winlaw (who went on to make 124 not out). The latter is still the county record for that wicket. Just a little bit special, then. Unlike the previous year, the Minor Counties did not have an end of season representative match in 1936. If they had done, Poole would surely have been a serious contender for a place; but it was not to be. At the start of the following season a Minor Counties side went to Dublin for a three-day first-class match, followed by a one-day game, in mid-May 1937, but Poole was not in the team for that, or for the repeat game against the University in Oxford early in June. Maybe for once he had used up too much of his annual leave allowance for his local government masters to allow him further time off - or maybe he just wasn’t selected. But a decline in his form for Bedfordshire meant that his time for higher honours had come and gone. His 234 proved to be the last century of his Minor Counties career - even though that career still had 14 years to run. The 1937 season brought him just 307 runs at 23.61, and 1938 was even less successful, with his average dropping below 20 for the first time since 1931. But there was one compensation: for the first time in his 14 years with the club he had the chance to captain the county side, in the temporary absence of the regular captain Roger Winlaw. According to Wisden , it was a chance he took well, though it was to be eight years before he had the opportunity to build on this initial experience. 9 By the start of the 2016 season, there had been a total of 16 higher scores made in the competition. So close