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

197 Chapter Twenty-three A new home for his family and the cricket school – Lordswood, near Toulston, Tadcaster The period after his retirement from professional league cricket saw a new venture. He sold the old nets at Rothwell to his son-in-law Graham Twigg in 1976, and hoped he could build a residential cricketing centre in a big house he had bought outside Tadcaster, Toulston Grange, where the family now moved. The project would have been demanding at the best of times. Unfortunately the house proved too big and expensive to heat adequately for living there and this aspect of the plan was abandoned and the house eventually sold. Johnny created outdoor nets on the land he had acquired nearby. The family (or those still at home – Johnny, Mary, Miles and Stephen) lived in a mobile chalet (like a wooden Portakabin) for a while before two new houses would provide a home for the family and provide some indoor nets and squash courts. The name chosen for the new school would be first of all Lord’s Wood which became eventually Lordswood as Stephen – his youngest son and by now main helper – had discovered on an old Ordnance Survey map that the wooded part of the land had been known as Lords Plantation. It is next to the hamlet of Toulston, near to Tadcaster – that brewery town between Leeds and York. The new school opened with three lanes of cricket nets. Miles and Sam among others had also contributed to its building. The building project was featured on a BBC programme ‘Hometown’. Johnny continued to be a forward-looking coach who, for example, introduced a bowling machine as early as 1978 (made by a scientific instrument-making company