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

7 His early life is made more of a difficult subject by the fact that school records, early cricketing records and even many newspaper records no longer exist. Thus there are huge gaps in this book – huge areas of the unknown and of speculation. I have tried to lay bare my ignorance when this has been the case – but hopefully not at the expense of disturbing the continuity of describing his life story. At the last moment before submission to my editor I came to realise strongly that many of the details of league matches that I had collated were simply hard to read for the vast majority of readers. I really wanted to keep them in the book so I’ve chosen to relegate them to an appendix. This appendix may be of special interest to followers of league cricket and can be read alongside the main text. It may bring back to life some of the names in league cricket and illustrate the competivity. In describing Johnny’s art of spin bowling, I decided to relegate all the explanations of the mechanics of spin bowling in general which I’d put in to make the book explicable to the general reader into a further appendix to be ignored by those who find it superfluous and also by those who don’t want to be troubled by these details. I am hoping – in writing what is my first book (apart from a brief collection of poetry) – that I have at least done a half- decent job. Part two – one biographer in search of his subject For quite a while I couldn’t explain to myself or to anyone else why I had dreamed up the idea of writing this work or why the project became totally consuming to me. After all I had never met the man and had only dim recollections of seeing him bowl. I thought I had seen him in a Minor Counties match at Headingley and thought I remembered him bowling from the Football Stand End – but then discovered from my research that all his matches in that competition for Preamble