Strathmore Cricket Union: the first 90 years a history 1928-2018

57 This year saw new winners of the Strathmore Union in Aberdeen Grammar School FPs. This was only their second year in the League. They confirmed their victory in a rather anti-climactic way, for bad light stopped play on Sunday 29th August at Mannofield in a game which could have gone either way. The draw however was enough to prevent anyone from catching them as they had had a splendid victory the day before at Forthill when T H McCrea, who had recently joined the club from Greenock, had taken 10 wickets for 18 runs to dismiss Forthill XI for 51. On the Sunday, in the drawn game at Mannofield he took another 5 wickets. He took 54 wickets throughout the season at an average of 5.5, but he was pipped in the Bowling Averages by his fellow Grammarian L E Tyson. In the Batting, it was Strathmore’s Ernie Balfour who came out top with 54.7. Strathmore had the consolation of winning the 2nd XI Championship, but lost in the final of the Three Counties Cup to Perthshire XI as Perthshire chased down Strathie’s disappointing score of 85 with 2 Overs to spare in a game played at Victory Park, Meigle. But 1948 in Aberdeen will be remembered not so much for the triumph of Aberdeen Grammar School in the Strathmore Union, nor indeed for the continued sustained success of Aberdeenshire themselves in the Scottish Counties Championship, as for the events of September when, before a record crowd of over 10,000 at Mannofield on 18th September, Don Bradman, the world’s iconic sportsman of 1948, played his last game in Britain before retirement and hit 123 not out to the delight of the Aberdeen crowd who made all sort of jokes about him really being one of the “Dons”. He was considerably less popular with some of his fellow Australians. He was out for a second ball duck to Eric Hollies in his last TestMatch at theOval – an event greeted with loud glee in the Press Box by two of his erstwhile Test Match colleagues, Jack Fingleton and Bill O’Reilly who hated him. But right up to the end of his life, Bradman would speak highly of Scotland and Aberdeen in particular, and this event is rightly commemorated in pictures at Mannofield to this day. The AGM in Forfar a month later carried an interesting and sensible motion to the effect that the League should in future be decided on a percentage basis rather than on points. The League now consisted of 11 teams (Blairgowrie having competed in 1948) and although Sunday games were now more and more prevalent, some grounds and local authorities still