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

203 Chapter Twenty-five Epitaph – proteges become coaches In coaching the likes of Don Wilson, Jack Birkenshaw, Peter Stringer, Geoffrey Boycott, Tim Boon, Steven Rhodes and Kevin Sharp as well as his own youngest son Stephen Lawrence, for example, he passed on his philosophy of the game of cricket to a new generation of players who would become top coaches. Besides Don Wilson’s huge and historic place in the history of coaching, we find also, amongst these stars: Jack Birkenshaw was at the time I interviewed him (aged 70) an ECB spin bowling coach and coach to England Ladies team. Peter Stringer became coach to Wanderers of Johannesburg – the most prestigious team in South Africa – the equivalent there of MCC in England. Stephen Lawrence continues to run the Johnny Lawrence Cricket School at Lordswood. We can imagine a cricket equivalent of a family tree – though not blood-based but descending from George Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes and the so-called classical period of the 1900s – through the 1920s and 1930s with Emmott Robinson and Herbert Sutcliffe through Johnny and some others of his generation certainly including the official Yorkshire coaches Arthur Mitchell, Maurice Leyland, Arthur Wood, Arthur Booth and Bill Bowes (‘all these wonderful people’ as Don Wilson called them) and leading in sometimes two more generations to the present day. There is no doubt that, since Hirst himself, Johnny occupies the single most important place in that family tree. I’m not suggesting that Yorkshire cricket has a monopoly on these matters. Hirst’s contemporary and colleague for England ‘Tiger’ Smith certainly played a similar role at Warwickshire and subsequent generations would learn from his tutees for example from Tom Cartwright who moved to Glamorgan and became the head coach for Welsh