Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

152 This was the year when all the coaching and development work finally paid dividends. Under the captaincy of Ronnie Burnet the first team broke Surrey’s stranglehold on the Championship and, at the seventh time of asking, took the title in sensational fashion - with just seven minutes of the season remaining. Maurice and Arthur Mitchell were rarely seen by the first team players once the season started. They perhaps got to the odd game at Bradford or Headingley, but they never travelled with the team. Maurice was at Scarborough, to see a side including many of his proteges bring home the trophy last won outright by Yorkshire in his own final season, 1946, but this was their moment and, full of pride, he just looked on from a distance - and enjoyed. Scarborough held many happy memories for Maurice and his family but there was also one particularly unpleasant Festival week when he was taken ill while staying at the Royal Hotel. On the Wednesday, having only limited interest in the cricket match that day, he had played a couple of rounds of golf in the afternoon. All seemed fine but he was woken up in the night with chest pains and the following morning Connie spoke to a doctor acquaintance, also staying at the hotel, who suggested an immediate trip to Scarborough Hospital. For the next fortnight Maurice was flat out in the hospital, forbidden to move, and a further week of light exercise followed before he was allowed to return home. The heart attack was the equivalent of a warning shot fired across the bow of a Grimsby trawler, the SS Leyland perhaps. It was time to stop and take stock. At long last the medical profession had made the connection between smoking and cardio-vascular disease so out of thewindowwent the pipe and fags.And suddenly, diet became an issue too. Giving up his Yorkshire puddings proved even harder than giving up tobacco but, while Maurice stuck to it, the benefits of these lifestyle changes were limited as the progression of his Parkinson’s disease left him increasingly incapacitated. Eventually it became obvious he could no longer fulfil his coaching duties and, on Monday, November 19, 1962 he announced his retirement. What is surprising about the announcement was not that he was Against the odds