So my first blog for a while, actually ‘a while’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting….

But I went back and realised that my last blog was written on the day of the first national Covid lockdown in 2020. Whilst I had my struggles in lockdown, I also managed to get a 2:1 BA in Geography at Plymouth Uni but probably the effect of 30 x 2000+ words essays, and a 10,000-word dissertation put me off writing anything for a while.

But I’ve got some blogs buzzing around my brain and its curious that, as I approach 3/4s of a century, my memory starts to bring forward long forgotten incidents.

So, to this blog, and let me warn you it doesn’t have a happy ending.

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I went to a grammar school. I was rubbish at schoolwork, couldn’t concentrate for toffee, so I left at 16 having scraped 4 O levels, and at the age of 16 years and 8 weeks I reported for work at the National Provincial Bank in Southampton. But grammar school life was good with some inspirational teachers.

In the 3^rd year we had an English master join the school called John Smith. He was an old boy of the school, very funny but tough on malingerers. We found out that he was an excellent cricketer holding all sorts of school run-scoring records, but had given up cricket due to illness, tuberculosis, or consumption as it used to be called.

So, whilst, as a malingerer, I kept my head down, his lessons were interspersed with cricketing anecdotes and discussions on how the test match was going.

But the next bit I only remembered recently.

We were in a lesson, and he suddenly started talking about Keith Miller, the Australian all-rounder. I won’t detail his record, but if you look at it you see he is one of the greatest of all time. Mr Smith said he had seen him play in a match in Southampton Parks, for the Royal Australian Air Force team against a ‘Parks XI’.

Alongside his football career Dad was an accomplished cricketer, he played one first team match for Hampshire (a friendly) but his top-level cricket activity was restricted by only being able to play from the end of May to the beginning of July when pre-season football training started. But I loved going to watch him at Southgate and later for Follands, and he played a whole season of one day Sunday matches for a celebrity XI around the south of England at the end of the 60’s. But that’s for another blog. Dad played Parks cricket during and after the war and started a club with Charles Knott (dad’s best friend, ‘Uncle Charlie’ to me) and Ron Gooch, later a Football League referee; the club was called Charondon after their Christian names. Uncle Charlie would go on to take 676 wickets for Hampshire in 20-year career, including 47 ‘fifers’.

So having recently remembered the classroom incident I set about searching Google for reference to the match. Most relevant Google searches take less than a second, but with the absence of keywords it took me about 15 minutes to find the definitive reference in the form of The Hampshire Cricket Society Newsletter No. 249 from November 2004 which also helpfully quotes extensively from a John Arlott essay about the match, the newsletter being published shortly after Keith Miller’s death in 2004.

The match was around 1943 and was obviously arranged at short notice as the RAAF team included several ‘guest’ players including Ft. Officer E. Drake aka the Arsenal legend Ted Drake as well as other Hampshire players.

It also reproduced the scorecard:-

But weirdly, where is D Roper? Nowhere to be seen! Other names I recognised, Arthur Holt, who later owned the sports shop, Holt and Haskell, in Shirley Road, Southampton where I used to go with Dad in later years when he wanted a new bat. Johnny Arnold, Hampshire cricketer, Uncle Charlie, Lloyd Budd, Hampshire cricketer who later became a Test Match umpire, his son Ray was in the year above me at school.

John Arlott’s article may hold a clue, he was still in the police force at the time, but he says he went on as a substitute fielder. So that’s all I can think, maybe Dad went on as a substitute fielder as well, and that’s how Mr Smith remembered seeing him on the field?

But all in all, a very odd memory episode, especially when you worry that your memory is starting to go anyway!!

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Epilogue:

• The Hampshire Cricket Society Newsletter can be found at: –

http://www.hantscricsoc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Newsletter_2011_12_313.pdf

• It’s interesting how a grammar school boy can’t break the habit of calling former teachers ‘Mr.’
• Dad was never called up for wartime military service. He was 3 weeks too young, when the cut-off deadline was decided. Instead, he became an engineer and built Spitfires at the old Supermarine factory in Woolston.
• In later years after my Dad died. sadly my Mum’s memory largely went, and she ended up in a nursing home. She died in 2016 but maybe 6/7 years before that we took her out for a drive around Southampton to places where she grew up to try and jog her memory. She hadn’t said much at all but we were driving up West End Road in Bitterne and we went past the Bitterne Brewery pub (now demolished) and she suddenly said “John Arlott used to drink in there in the war!” And that was that.
• Lastly dear reader you may well be thinking, “why didn’t he go home from school and ask his Dad about the match” Indeed. Please see earlier blog re Gary Imlach.