Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

A family affair 44 scrapbook, she had a habit of stopping still on the wicket and refusing to respond to Ted’s attempts to move her. In those circumstances only Cora seemed to have any effect on the horse. Cora, though eventually establishing herself as a chiropodist in Birmingham, spent some time assisting Ted on the ground, with her cousin Wilf, making it quite a family affair. Not surprisingly, whenever Yorkshire were playing at Edgbaston the cameras were inevitably there to record Maurice meeting the rest of the family. The outbreak of war, at the end of the 1939 season, signalled the end of Ted and Mercy’s stay in Birmingham. With full time cricket suspended, Ted retired and returned north with his wife to Harrogate while Cora, having built a life for herself in the Midlands, stayed behind. Ted and Mercy went on to celebrate their golden wedding in January 1948 but their life together was to take a turn for the worse. In November that year he suffered a slight stroke and though he seemed to be on the road to recovery, he collapsed and died on the night of Sunday, February 6, 1949 at his New Park home. Ted was cremated at Stonefall Cemetery the following Wednesday with Maurice and Cora, cousins, aunts and uncles on both sides of the family, there to support the grieving Mercy. One obituary notice hailed Ted: “Famous in his own day as one of the foremost cricket groundsmen in the country.” In Over the Summers Again George Greaves turned to one time Warwickshire club secretary Leslie Deakins to provide him with a more detailed picture of Ted Leyland and it bears repetition. “Ted Leyland,” said Deakins, “was a stockily built man of rather less than medium height, with a strong face and wide set light blue eyes that missed but little that was worth seeing”: He had small part with the mechanical age of groundsmen, for much of his cutting and all his rolling was done with the aid of a horse, and he was at all times very close to the nature from which he’d sprung. He was never to be seen in overalls, but rather with old trousers, a waistcoat always unbuttoned, a thick flannel shirt, and a cloth cap set square on his head. He was unhurried in movement but achieved much in a day, and when he spoke it was in Yorkshire dialect, with limited but very effective vocabulary. In his waistcoat pocket he invariably