Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

was a downside. The Yorkshire Evening Post carried a story of a housewife who was so engrossed in the radio commentary of the Hutton-Leyland stand that she forgot all about shopping for the Sunday meals. With no supermarkets or Sunday opening for shops in those days there were a few hungry men about in Yorkshire that weekend. * Looking back it seems inconceivable that anyone could organise a game that began one day and, regardless of how things stood at the close of play, then immediately gave everyone a day off - before coming back two days later to continue without a break for as long as it took to finish. However, that was how things were for this Oval Test in 1938 and, following the exertions of the Saturday, Sunday was a rest day. Several of the players began their winding down with a visit to a London restaurant on Saturday night. With them was the London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian who was surprised at the scene. Despite the already record-breaking exertions of the day even Maurice and Len Hutton were able to pass unnoticed in the crowd. It was a relaxed evening with things, as the writer suggested, ‘exactly as they would wish’. They sat quietly, talking among themselves in small groups, in the same place but not together. Their private meal was scarcely interrupted. Only a handful of people exchanged a word with them throughout the evening and there was not an autograph hunter in sight. The Guardian man reported: ‘They seemed quiet, self-contained men, definitely onlookers and un-selfconscious, moderately happy, contemplatively smoking their pipes and cigarettes like men thinking out the next move at chess’ - presumably that didn’t include the two who got up to the music and did the ‘Lambeth Walk’. However, even allowing for the odd exhibition of mild exuberance, when the party got up to leave the restaurant at about 10pm they hardly turned a head. Did anyone realise that they were in the presence men standing on the brink of sporting immortality? * The match 23