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

96 A first class career with Somerset Worcester, he took eight for 41 on a rain-affected pitch when seven wickets would fall in an hour after lunch, and these remained the best bowling figures of his career. They contributed to a total of 115 wickets which was not only his highest season aggregate but also, with a bowling average of 18.90, the best season’s figures of his career. Moreover, in 1950 his batting form returned and he scored 981 runs. A contributory factor in his bowling success was his understanding with the Somerset wicketkeeper, Harold Stephenson. Somerset’s cricket historian described it thus: “The prodigious leg-break would beat the bat and ‘Steve’ would knock off the bails with the merest flick.” This created an expression of “glee on Lawrence’s face as an exasperated batsman pounded forward and missed ...” Somerset ended this season joint seventh with Gloucestershire in the Championship. 1951 From 1951, Lawrence assumed an even more senior role among the professionals. By this time the relative strength of the side achieved in 1946 had long gone and the team carried several elder statesmen who were – as the young opening bat of the period, Roy Smith, told me – sometimes slow and cumbersome in the field. Of the ‘old men’, Johnny Lawrence retained by far the greatest athleticism but he was nearly always best fielding close to the bat usually at backward short leg – or finer – at leg slip, or as a slip, where he continued to take a remarkable number of often extremely acrobatic catches. Wisden noted Lawrence turned 40 in March 1951 and over the remaining five years of his first-class career there was a subtle change in his role as a Somerset cricketer. “Reliable throughout for 70 or more wickets a season, he never passed 100 again, though he got close with 93 in 1954. But his batting continued to develop and was increasingly important in a side whose frailties in every department consigned it to the foot of the County Championship for four consecutive seasons from 1952 to