Lives in Cricket No 50 - Tom Emmett

10 Early days (1841-1866) went right through a window—and windows were ‘out’. And, what was even worse, there was an old man working behind it, combing wool by hand. The glass cut his forehead, and he came rushing out with the blood showing upon him. I never was so frightened in my life, and when he threatened to have us all up before the magistrates, life seemed very hollow indeed. However, when he had gone in we continued to play cricket. 6 Emmett and his friends also used the driveway to the house of a local businessman, Henry Ambler (who owned Holmfield Mills), which had two stone posts at the entrance to the carriage drive which they used as wickets. Emmett commented that ‘That was where I was initiated into cricket, and where I first found I could hit the post with a round-arm delivery.’ There too, he and his friends often had to avoid a policeman in his silk hat whose appearance would cause them all to run off. Games were taken very seriously, Emmett remembering that ‘There was a lot of rivalry among the boys who played on the ‘Walk Top’. It got to the length of arranging a single-wicket match, and we played for 2d ‘a man’. We never were such swells before. I turned out in a beautiful white smock and clogs.’ 7 One of the gate posts to The Grange in Keighley Road, Illingworth where Emmett learned to bowl in the 1850s. Still standing in 2017.