Redruth Cricket Club

In 1980 I made my debut for Redruth CC at Dafen CC in Swansea on my first RCC tour whilst playing for Braywood. My school friend Paul Berryman had heard I was playing the game again and suggested I make my way down to Swansea for the Redruth annual tour to Wales. The tour initially came about through Brian Kelleher a Welshman exiled to Cornwall for work who played for Redruth when away from the principality. His home club was Pontarddulais CC and initially the tour was based in Bristol with one trip down the M4 to play ‘The Bont’. As the Welsh leg of the tour was so popular it was decided to have more fixtures in Wales and be based there with one game against Long Ashton CC on the way home. This particular tour started in Swansea with a fixture at Dafen CC which was to become the traditional tour opening match and I made my debut for Redruth on that ground in match we lost fairly comfortably. The top leagues in Wales were of a high standard and they always managed to field a few of their best players against any tourists from England. Of course we were quick to point out that Cornwall isn’t in England but a Celtic nation with it’s own language, flag and national anthem which the Welsh soon learned to sing better than we did. The weather in West Wales is similar to West Cornwall in that the prevailing Atlantic winds tend to carry a fair amount of moisture in them which is then deposited on the first landfall it comes to.

As a result that turned out to be the only match in Wales with the next two being washed out and just the Long Ashton fixture left which did beat the weather. The fact there was no cricket for two days was not seen as such a bad thing and the pitch and putt over the road from the Pantycelyn Hotel on Oystermouth Road provided some sport until the local hostelries opened. I had played a fair amount of golf with Paul at Truro Golf Club before moving to Berkshire where we would wile away many hours in the school holidays. We were probably the only ones au fait with the rules of the game and Paul would invoke the ‘hole made by a burrowing animal’ rule on many occasions when his ball came to rest in what was a sizeable hole in the rather rough terrain the constituted the course. “That hole is so big it must have been made by an elephant” he remarked on a few occasions but were unable to determine whether an elephant constituted a ‘burrowing animal’ under the rules set out by The Royal and Ancient Golf Club. There were some big hitters in the Redruth team with muscles honed in the tin mines of Cornwall and they could hit a cricket ball a fair way on occasions. Bill “Buff” Rogers was one of these and he launched into a golf ball with similar results but not necessarily in the intended direction of the ‘fairway’. One wayward drive left the vicinity of the pitch and putt course and was last seen on it’s way towards Port Talbot bouncing down the Oystermouth Road. With the absence of cricket there was still much ammunition for the fines master each day to recount in the evening gatherings when the fines were dished out. Another prodigious hitter of a cricket ball was Paul Thomason who was an imposing figure but gentle enough with it unless you happening to be up against him on the rugby or cricket field. On another washed out day four of us decided to try our hands at lawn bowls at the public bowls club in Mumbles. Getting used to the bias and which way the bowl would travel took a bit of getting used to and sometimes the bowl would be launched off with the bias in the opposite side of the bowl than intended. This would result in your bowl making its way into the adjoining game on the same green and scattering the bowls and jack just at a crucial point in their game. It didn’t go down too well with our fellow players but people didn’t tend to get too angry with Paul whose nickname was Hooley. Once we got the hang of the biases we were able to just play in our own area and in one particular end most of the bowls had got within reasonable distance of their intended target. Hooley was last to go and decided a weight bowl would be the best way of dispersing the bowls clustered round the jack. He wound up for a big delivery and sent the ball down the green. Unfortunately that particular tactic didn’t pay dividends on this occasion and the bowl went very quickly past all the array of balls and missed all of them. It was still travelling at a fair lick having not had anything to arrest it’s forward momentum and reached the edge of the green. The ditch that was there to catch such deliveries was not effective against the weight of this delivery and it made contact with the rounded edge of the green elevating it through the hedge behind. It’s progress then continued onto the busy Mumbles Road behind narrowly missing the oncoming traffic and finally coming to rest on the other side of the road. Luckily the bowl was retrieved unscathed and deposits returned and the fines master had more ammunition from the day.