Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

As previously mentioned, Ted and Mercy were only 20 when they married in 1898 and within two years Maurice was born. Cora arrived in 1908 and life for the Leylands was, for a while, settled. But, as Ted, then Maurice, became involved in professional cricket, coupled with the outbreak of the First World War, there was upheaval, and once again separations, in their lives. Although Mercy never spoke about being affected by the disruptions of her early life there is a hint of some deep rooted insecurity in some comments made in her scrapbooks and photo albums. Her immediate family clearly meant everything to her, but the terms in which these feelings are sometimes expressed leaves a suspicion of some compensatory mechanism at work. Emotional traumas of childhood cannot fail to affect later Mum’s the word 52