Lives in Cricket No 52 - Schooled in Cricket (2nd edition)

10 still back into the past (in that case 130 years) and plausibly recreates a complete picture of all the missing details in the tapestry of a mystery puzzle unsolved. I did not for one moment think that I would have such luck in dealing with reality in writing biography and not fiction – and when I did my research I was to discover that all the school records of Johnny’s school and all the records of his first cricket club had long since been destroyed. But there was still the 1911 census – the actual year of Johnny’s birth – and the electoral registers for those long-lost times – and even property deeds if I should so delve. When I did at least delve a little way along that route I did discover who was living where, when; and it made sudden sense of all that I’d been told in family interviews and put these in perspective. There was an astonishing discovery that Johnny’s father had written the presumably not yet named or baptised child’s name down on the 1911 census form as William – a name not in the end given to the baby. (There was not to be a middle name.) So perhaps I could have been just as easily writing the Billy Lawrence Story! I was fascinated by Johnny Lawrence the Yorkshireman steeped in the traditions of his native county who played his first-class career in exile in Somerset and who went on to coach so many great players. The most famous of these would be Geoffrey Boycott who readily and extensively acknowledges his debt to his teacher in his own autobiography and adds more comments to me on interview – and in his foreword. I then became further fascinated when I learned how incredibly resourceful Johnny was – building everything, on his own or with others; from his own caravan to the cricket school at Rothwell at which he was to coach to whole houses and to the cricket nets he created. Perhaps the single most intriguing aspect of Johnny Lawrence’s cricketing life was the very slowness of his bowling. Many years later after I had seen him bowl, it must have subconsciously become a source of confidence building when I turned my hand, late in life, to playing Preamble