Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

57 Chapter five First steps to stardom After leaving the Army in 1919 it was back to work for Maurice and he duly completed his apprenticeship as a carpenter - while picking up extra cash in the summer as Harrogate’s professional. In fact, being a professional cricketer was the only thing he ever really wanted to be, according to his aunt Emma. Newspapers always look for local links whenever a national story breaks and with Maurice’s parents based in Birmingham the Harrogate press turned to Ted’s family for comment after a particularly good effort from their local star in the Brisbane Test on the 1932-33 tour. Ted’s sister Emma (White) recalled Maurice being asked, when a very young boy, what he wanted to do when he grew up, “Be a professional like dad” was the immediate response. No engine drivers in that household then. Maurice was always a natural sportsman - his mother always said that he played with a cricket bat even before he could walk. He actually captained his school rugby team and before the war there were those who suggested he could have made a footballer. Cricket was always going to be the winner; though one football story told by his uncle Fred in that same article of 1933 clearly illustrated how important the ‘team’ ethic was to Maurice - whatever sport he was playing. Playing on the local ground at New Park one of the home players was subjected to a particularly nasty foul and when the perpetrator found himself in Maurice’s vicinity with the ball, soon after, he was duly ‘clattered’. Mercy, watching the game with Fred, was horrified to see her son’s reaction; it seemed so out of character for a young man usually so restrained. Her brother-in-law quickly pointed out, however, that Maurice hadn’t actually committed a foul himself and it was all a question of everyone in the team being prepared to battle for each other to stop the opposition getting the upper hand. If anyone reading this report doubted the importance of this principle in cricket, every bit as much as it applied to football, they need only to have telegraphed Mr Jardine in Australia and he would have put them right. While Ted Leyland was undoubtedly the key figure in Maurice’s