Sheffield Cricket Lovers' Society Year Book 2013

35 Sheffield Cricket Lovers’ Society to squat on the edge of a terrace to pass judgment on the day’s play. “Anybody who ducked a bouncer was asked ‘What’s tha’ got a bat in thy hand for?’ And there were no helmets in those days even if you were facing Fred Trueman.” Fred relished the support that he received from his fellow south Yorkshiremen at Bramall Lane. But he didn’t get everything his own way. Tom Cartwright was still doing national service when he played one of his first games for Warwickshire at Sheffield in 1955. He managed to battle his way to 27, but what he remembered above all was the belligerent attitude towards Trueman taken by eccentric umpire Alec Skelding. “I can see Fred now,” Tom, told his biographer Stephen Chalke. “He swore and cursed all through; he was appealing a lot and snatching his sweater. And Alec held on to it and yanked it back. ‘I’ll clip his ear,’ he said to me. The crowd was getting more and more worked up. There was always this noise from the bank on the football stand side, and Alec said he was going to sort them out. I thought he was joking, but next moment he was over the fence. And there was this sudden hush. He came back and winked. ‘I told you I’d sort them out’.” It helped, no doubt, that Skelding had once been a heavyweight boxer who had fought Bombadier Billy Wells. Poor old John Warr of Middlesex could have done with Skelding’s intimidating presence when had a particularly miserable day at Bramall Lane. He laboured long for no wickets whatsoever, was out for a duck and dropped a catch in front of the grinders. “What’s tha’ coom oop here for, Warr?” boomed a voice from the terraces. “To sharpen thy pen knife?” Middlesex was evidently not the most popular of counties in these parts. Denis Compton’s capture of a stray dog on the boundary might have merited a round of applause. Instead there was uproarious laughter when the tyke – a Yorkshire terrier by all accounts -- promptly bit him on the thumb. Compton was regarded as a dashing national treasure in much of England; here he was seen as a rival to Len Hutton. But the crowd could give generous applause, even to a southerner, if they felt that he was playing exceedingly well. Kilburn recalled sitting in the Grinders’ Stand in the 1920s when Maurice Tate of Sussex took the new ball for the last half hour and bowled brilliantly with no luck whatsoever. “He beat both Holmes and Sutcliffe and shaved the stumps; he had each batsman palpably missed by the wicketkeeper, who was playfully strangled at the end of the over. Tate’s bowling was worth four wickets and he took none, but he was honoured by the ‘Grinders’.” A few years later, in the summer of ’33, the crowd rose as one and gave a tumultuous welcome to Douglas Jardine of Surrey, a southern “toff” if ever there was one. Jardine, of course, had captained England to victory Down Under that winter in the controversial “bodyline” series. Bramall Lane could be patriotic as well as partisan. The ground was still bomb-scarred in 1948 when the Australian tourists came to town and Sid Barnes was yorked by Yorkshire’s Ron Aspinall in the first over to elicit a roar worthy of a winning goal in the FA Cup Final.