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

81 Chapter Thirteen A first class career with Somerset The other arm of Johnny’s preparation was getting in situ his forthcoming first-class career with Somerset. Somerset’s fluctuating fortunes 1946-51 Somerset were a team full of character but in quite a different tradition to Johnny’s native Yorkshire. Sunshine, sixes and cider is how David Foot describes – in the title of his book – the whole tradition of Somerset cricket. He writes: “The history of Somerset county cricket has for ever been tinged with poetry: romantic notions and intense feelings and metaphors that mischievously leap from horror to hilarity.” Peter Roebuck, author of Sammy to Jimmy, the Official History of Somerset County Cricket Club writes in similar vein. Both these eponymous characters – Sammy Woods, a Bothamesque character who played his cricket back in the 1880s, and Jimmy Cook, an overseas player from South Africa some 100 years later – embodied Somerset’s colourful tradition. Roebuck writes well when he says: “Only anonymity or half-heartedness brings rebuke. Cricket matters here as it does in Leeds, though fortunately expectations are lower. And yet it is a desperately flawed, exasperating club too, one which has never known how to rule itself, one which accordingly stumbles along, occasionally making decisions audacious in their brilliance and otherwise searching for that elusive combination, wisdom and harmony.” Johnny was to fit in well with the positive side of this tradition and mercifully never seems to have been at all embroiled in the inner club politics (especially as he was back in Yorkshire coaching during Somerset’s winters of discontent such as 1953).