Letcombe Cricket Club

In 1982 I had a change in job and started working in Oxford and as it was
too far to commute from the Maidenhead so I took lodgings in a house in
Stanford-in-the-Vale near the The Vale of the White Horse. It turned out that
my landlady had been at the same school in Truro as my sister by pure
co-incidence and another friend of hers who played cricket lived in the area.
Having met him and found out I was a cricketer he asked me to play for Letcombe
the following Sunday in a home fixture against Oxford Wayfarers. Letcombe is a
village club in picturesque Letcombe Regis with Letcombe Basset a small hamlet
a bit further into the chalk downs. As a new player who are always encouraged
in these small village clubs they gave me a bat in the middle order although I
said I was mainly a bowler. I came in after an early collapse so just had to
stay in which was becoming a valuable attribute in the teams I played in where
wickets fell regularly, defensive strokes were not amongst many of the players
repertoire. You always want to do well on debut for any team and lucklily I
managed to stick around long enough to record my highest score of 39 in the team’s
total of 148-8 at tea.

Whilst being a great start to my time at Letcombe it was a bit of a double-edged
sword as they then thought I could bat and was immediately promoted to opener as
a result from then on. The ideal position in village and club cricket assuming
you are not a specialist batsman but do enjoy the challenge is to go in at
number 7 or 8. The opening bowlers have usually finished their opening burst
and are resting before coming back to mop up the tail and other more part time
bowlers might then be on. You are high enough not to be left high and dry by
the tail and can have a reasonable time left to build an innings. It was rare
in most of my club cricket that the lower order didn’t get a bat unless you had
skittled the opposition first for a low score and your openers had knocked it
off before the tea interval. For the rest of the season with Letcombe which amounted
to 15 games I only amassed a further 59 runs finishing with an average of 9.81
and had returned down the order from whence I had come by the end of the
season. I was more value to Letcombe as a bowler however ending up with 24
wickets in those games with the highlight being 6-41 against Bicester 2nd XI.

Letcombe was a friendly and social club for which i only played one full
season and like many of these small clubs was almost run single-handedly by one
man and his family. The Mr Letcombe had help from his wife with the catering
and also unusually in those days his daughter on the playing side. She was a
good opening bat who could hit the ball as well as any of her male counterparts
especially as her fellow makeshift opener for some of the games.

There were some interesting new village clubs to play against in the area such Buscot Park, Moredon Royal Oak and work-based clubs such as Swindon Civil Service and Morris Motors in Oxford. In midweek there were games in the Downs 20 over competition played amongst clubs in the Vale of the White Horse area including Uffington CC not far from the White Horse itself.

On Saturdays that season I played several games for Challow and Childrey CC a club side that played in the Oxfordshire leagues situated between Wantage and Stanford in the Vale as did several Letcombe players that wanted to play on Saturdays as well. The 1st XI was a standard much higher than I had played in before but the 2nd XI was more suited to my bowling at least with 9 wickets in my 3 matches for them with 4-43 the highlight against Stokenchurch 2nd XI.

My job in Oxford computer programming for a small company making medical instruments based in small offices behind Tesco’s in Cowley Road didn’t last long. Funding for their new immunoassay systems was hard to come and it didn’t seem a good long-term prospect. Searching for Innotron Limited on Google informs me “It looks like there aren’t many great matches for your search” so I assume they didn’t make the big breakthrough they were hoping for. I got a job in Wokingham for a company whose main customer was TVAM designing a system to compile their advert breaks. It enabled me to return to the Windsor and Maidenhead area and play for Braywood once more having at least enjoyed the cricket in the Wiltshire and Oxfordshire area for a season.