Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

146 Many happy returns bails. I was totally dejected. I couldn’t have been more upset, or so I thought, until Mitchell came up to me and said, ‘Well, lad, if tha’s gooin’ ter play like that, better not bother ter cum back.’ I did go back, however, because I was determined to show the old so-and-so that I could bat. His method sorted out the men from the boys. Some youngsters went home crying and never did go back. Maurice Leyland was completely different. He would have a quiet, fatherly word in your ear, using the softly, softly approach. The two of them working in tandem proved a great success. That success was, initially, mixed with a good share of frustration as Yorkshire finished runners-up to Warwickshire in 1951 and the all-conquering Surrey side in 1952, 1954 and 1955, while in 1953 the loss of Hutton, Watson, Wardle and Trueman, to England’s triumphant Ashes win, undoubtedly contributed to a disappointing 12th place finish. After the 1955 campaign there were further disappointments as the team finished seventh, third and 11th amid the kind of behind the scenes dramas that saw the dismissal of Wardle at the height of his career, in 1958. While all this was going on Maurice found himself engaged in a personal battle against chronic illness. From the knowledge we have today it is clear that, in a medical sense, he had become a walking time bomb. His father’s death from cardio-vascular disease would have sounded a warning to any family member today but even when his mother passed away in a Harrogate nursing home, in March 1952, from a combination of a chronic inflammation of the heart muscle, hardening of the arteries and broncho-pneumonia, following her own father’s early death from a stroke and subsequent heart failure, Maurice could still regularly be seen puffing away on his trademark pipe. He never gave it a second thought, why should he? Around the time of his mother’s death the World Sports magazine happily took the advertising revenue for RIZLA, ‘The World’s Finest Cigarette Papers’ and, what seems unbelievable given what we know, an advert for Godfrey Phillips’ ‘Minors’ cigarettes (supposedly the choice of ‘intelligent folk’) could be found in the Daily Graphic of February 11, 1952 under a