Lives in Cricket No 48 - Maurice Leyland

Introduction “Have you ever heard of Maurice Leyland?” said my friend Jayne. It was simple enough question but I never imagined just where it would lead. Having answered ‘of course’, in a ‘hint-of-excitement-slowly- giving-way-to-intrigue’ sort of way, I then asked just why one of this country’s greatest pre-war cricketers would be of any interest to someone with an intense dislike of cricket. “Oh, he was my grandma’s cousin,” she explained casually. Now I’m the sort of person who is never content to provide a simple answer - no matter how simple the question. Many times my children would be left muttering, ‘oh no, why did I open my mouth?’, after asking for simple clarification of something they were doing for their school homework. How they must have wished for a dismissive, ‘I don’t know’, instead of the half hour seminar delivered from my strategic position in front of the huge bookshelf that took up one wall of our modest sized living room. The desperate cries of ‘I don’t need to know all that, Dad!’ always went unheeded. On this occasion, however, my offer, to Jayne, to dig up information on Maurice was surprisingly well received. She had just begun to look into her family tree and was anxious to find out as much as possible about any of her relatives. Jayne’s great- grandmother, Eliza Anna, and Maurice’s mother, Mercy, were sisters and her grandmother, also called Mercy, had been able to recount a few personal memories of them - but Jayne wanted to know more. Reference books provided some basic information like birth, death and playing career - and some reference to him can be found in most books covering cricket between the wars. The latter was not surprising considering his achievement in chalking up over 30,000 career runs and playing 41 Tests in an international career spanning a decade. But, beyond that, little seemed to have been written of the man himself. Initial enquiries were encouraging, despite me being all too often left with more questions than answers, but the obstacles that appear to have thwarted would-be 5