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

68 A man of his times who became a role model for other players bus that was being scrapped, discarding the lower half but using the frame of the top half attached to a trailer to make a giant caravan for his family to live in during the summer in the car park of the County Ground at Taunton when he started playing there regularly in 1946. Eventually he scrapped this and acquired a new caravan which he continued to use for some time after he had retired from Somerset. In one of his last building projects he converted a Renault van into a camper van. His vision for what he could do physically would tie up with his vision as a cricket coach when with his brother Sammy he would create a cricket school by a unique building project which enabled Johnny to have his own cricket school from 1946 but more of that anon. Throughout his cricketing life he would seek ways to improve those facilities, improve and experiment with different surfaces to bowl on and even introduce a very early model of what has now become commonplace in cricket coaching – the bowling machine. Johnny had visions for the world even when it was going through grim times as he was in his quiet way a deeply political person. His daughter Dinah told me that he seemed to have a tear in his eye the night that Martin Luther King was assassinated when he came to her room and told her the news. This is just one example – though perhaps a rare one – of how deeply he felt about world affairs. I have already mentioned the wonderful opportunity that Johnny took to get to know his coach George Hirst better and to learn more about cricketing and coaching technique – and Hirst must have also imparted a lot of his enthusiasm and optimistic view of life to another of life’s natural optimists! Johnny also befriended whilst still a young man other coaches and they welcomed him into the fold as a promising cricketer who was always willing to learn. He was serious minded with strong religious and political ideas but he was also light-hearted and forgiving. He was