Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

149 Hillman Minx, and it was during these rides down to Leeds that I first noticed something wrong. Even now I have this recollection of sitting next to Maurice and seeing his hands wobbling a bit on the steering wheel. Maurice had been under the doctor for some time when, in August 1958, he and Connie decided he would undergo a pioneering surgical technique in a bid to improve his condition and he booked into the Brotherton Wing of the Leeds Royal Infirmary. Myles Gibson, at 89, was still involved with the Professional Footballer Association - and still had a practice in Leeds a decade before. He was in 1958 one of the youngest neuro-surgeons in the country but he was the man in charge. At the time he told the Yorkshire Evening Post : It is a rare operation, chiefly because so few people know about it. I know general practitioners who have never heard of it, and so the result is, of course, that the patients don’t get the benefit of it. It was first performed about two years ago, and I have performed several of these operations since then. It has been written about more recently. The operation involved cutting a hole in the skull, inserting a needle into this opening and steering it to a site in the mid-brain area where nerve pathways involved in limb movement criss- cross. The aim was to sever some of the nerve fibres and Mr Gibson went on to explain that the operation was an extremely delicate one and, though stating the obvious, emphasised the importance of getting the needle in just the right place to avoid brain damage. Akeen sportsman himself, playing football at reserve team level for Queens Park in his younger days, the Scottish-born surgeon knew from the outset how important a successful outcome of this operation was for someone like Maurice. In more recent years the tendency has been for the medical men to opt for a pharmacological solution to the problems experienced by Parkinson’s sufferers, an area in which there have Against the odds