Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

really was. His condition worsened drastically during the French leg of the trip and word was sent to his wife to meet them off the boat at Southampton. By the time he reached England there was real concern about his condition and it became necessary to make the final stage of his journey, from London, in an ambulance. Some reports claim Kilner refused medical assistance in the early stages of the illness, preferring to wait until he got back home; if that were the case it was to prove a fatal delay. There have been suggestions that a shell fish meal, eaten just before he left India, may have been contaminated and others referred to eating tinned food. His condition was initially described in general terms as ‘enteric fever’ but later sources have identified para-typhoid as the specific infection. In any event Kilner’s fight for his life cast something of a shadow over the wedding day of his good friend Maurice, on Saturday, March 25, at St Mary’s Parish Church, West Cliffe Grove, Low Harrogate, to his fiance Conelia ‘Connie’ Russell. The Russell family home was at College Road and that was the place Maurice and Connie were to live for the rest of their lives. Aware that his cricketing career was likely to take him away from home for long periods, Maurice felt Connie would be better off with the support of her family around her at those times and had no hesitation moving in with his new in-laws. Interestingly, the tale of the couple’s courtship and marriage took on quite an exotic flavour with the re-telling through the wider outreaches of the family. Maurice’s cousin Mercy was only six at the time of the wedding and she recalls being told as a child, “Maurice went to Australia to play cricket, stopped off on the way home and arrived back with a new wife.” The thought of this quietest and conservative of men coming home to Yorkshire with a wife plucked from the obscurity of some uncivilised far off native paradise is one that could not be further removed from reality and the suggestion brought a smile from his nephew Geoff Rimington. “I could not imagine anything more out of character,” he chuckled. Connie, in fact, came fromHarrogate - from anAnglican Church background - and her father was an old time horse drawn cab driver who was eventually forced into retirement after finding himself overtaken by the increasingly widespread use of the 1928, an unforgettable year 66