Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

for the final Test and his name was not among those chosen to make the trip. Young Yorkshire colleague Norman Yardley had been invited in his place and, though Denis Compton had opted to remain at home to play football for Arsenal, there was a more youthful look about the MCC party. Still, any thoughts of what the future might hold were quickly forgotten as current events took over and the present became history in the making. There was little time for the players to rest in a pre-war cricket season so there was a sense of relief for Yorkshire’s England quartet when their championship match with Gloucestershire, at Scarborough, finished at three minutes to six on the second day. In the event of the match extending over the full three days the provisional travelling arrangements to London didn’t bear thinking about. With Gloucester’s Hammond and Goddard, the players faced the prospect of having to catch the 20.05 train from Scarborough and arriving in London at 3.15am on Saturday. Attempts to arrange for an early finish were unsuccessful but in the end it was agreed that they would travel to York where the Silver Jubilee train would make an unscheduled stop to pick them up. However, it was all academic for while Maurice, with Hutton, Bowes and Verity, still had the journey to make to London the second day finish meant they could do it in a more leisurely way. The same could not be said of team-mate Arthur Wood. With Paul Gibb having sustained a smack on the head which had kept him out of the fourth Test, Arthur had only just returned to the Yorkshire side but a wicket-keeping crisis developed in the England ranks when Les Ames declared himself unfit to play having failed to recover from the broken finger that kept him out at Headingley. Fred Price of Middlesex had come in for that game but now he too was injured so Arthur, who was to celebrate his 40th birthday the day after the match, received his first Test call up. Unfortunately it was the night before the game and the Yorkshireman was already in Nottingham with his county team-mates awaiting the start of their Championship match the following morning. His instructions were to join the England team immediately - and what followed has become legend. His first problem: how was he going to get from Nottingham to London? Trains certainly ran from Nottingham, arriving at A very happy return 13