Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

at the Majestic Hotel in Harrogate but my dad was a bad ‘un and they wouldn’t have him around. He was an alcoholic and, though he was always a wonderful father to me and my brother, he was a terrible husband and used to treat my mother very badly. He was also epileptic, they said he couldn’t control his violent moods, and my mother had a terrible life with him.” Cousin Mercy’s dad, Herbert Hawksworth, was also the great- uncle of the former Bradford City, Huddersfield Town, Sheffield United, Lincoln City and England B international forward Derek Hawksworth, himself a fine Bradford League cricketer. But, sporting connections or not, Uncle Herbert was not welcomed into Maurice’s more immediate family circle. Mercy remembers her father taking her to Park Avenue, as a child, to watch Maurice play but there was no meeting after the game. “My dad would have probably started pestering him for money,” she explained, “I think he’d done that before. He knew he wasn’t welcome.” However, in contrast, there was a pleasant family reunion for Maurice in Australia in 1928-9, when, while leaving the ground after the close of the day’s play in the Test at Brisbane, he was approached by a boy who, politely, said, “How do you do Mr Leyland.” “How do you do,” replied Maurice. “You don’t know me do you?” continued the stranger. “No, I’m afraid I don’t,” said Maurice, still intrigued by the confrontation. “Well, I’m your cousin.” The boy was in fact the son of Maurice’s uncle Dick, his mother’s half-brother, who had emigrated to Australia as a young man to work on a sheep farm. Maurice then discovered that he had, in fact, three other cousins living on the other side of the world but this surprise discovery is another indication of the fragmentation that had occurred in his mother’s family. Della married Wombwell man Herbert Kaye and moved away to Barnsley; his aunts Annie, Polly and Sally all ended up in the Bradford area. Dick went to Australia; Lily, after a broken marriage, died at the age of 48; while Ena married and moved away to Scarborough, where Maurice and his wife Connie regularly visited in later life. Mum’s the word 51