By Isle of Wight Observer
My 75-year-old Isle of Wight cricket journey has brought me to my volunteer role as a Trustee of Newclose County Cricket Ground, and to the pleasure of staging the recent women’s professional match between the Southern Vipers and The Blaze, and, on August 22, the highlight of our season, a one-day county match when Hampshire Hawks host the Kent Spitfires. Newclose is the ground that local businessman, the late Brian Gardener, established fifteen years ago, and a crowd of 2,500 is expected.
There is a family photo of me as a toddler holding my cricket bat in front of my grandmother’s beach hut at Puckpool Park in the late 1940s. Living in Buckinghamshire, my parents, brother and I only saw the seaside once a year, when we spent wonderful summer holidays staying with my aunt and cousins in Ryde. How I dreamed of living on the Island.
Seven decades later, I realised that dream, in 2008, when I retired from work at Sussex County Cricket Club (CCC) and my role as chief executive. Work at Barclays Bank in the 1960s preceded a business life in sales and sales management. Along the way, my love of cricket saw me playing for village clubs in Buckinghamshire and Sussex. When my employer’s sales force downsized, in early 1995, I received a decent redundancy payment and decided to treat myself to a summer without heavy work commitments. Then aged about 50, I was Littlehampton Cricket Club’s secretary, captain of the Third Eleven, and manager of junior section, the Colts, introducing school children to the sport.
It was my good fortune to see Sussex CCC advertising for an assistant secretary. I got the job! Starting at Sussex in July 1995 gave me the most rewarding final decade of my working life. By 2002 I’d moved through the ranks and was chief executive of Sussex CCC, which, a year later in 2003, won the County Championship for the first time since it was formed in 1839. Players and staff had the honour of visiting Buckingham Palace to receive the ‘Lord’s Taverners’ Trophy’ from the cricket charity’s president, His late Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh.
Sussex won the trophy again in 2006 and that year, on my 60th birthday, it was my choice to retire. After two more years working part-time for two Sussex cricket charities, I left Sussex in order to support my elderly mother in Bembridge. At about the same time I met Felicity, my wife-to-be. Life was being kind and the Island was the perfect place to be.
Newclose County Cricket Ground had just been opened to host Ventnor Cricket Club’s league matches, and I met the club’s enthusiastic chairman, John Hilsum, and their president, Brian Gardener, the ground’s benefactor. Brian and I got on really well, sharing a love of cricket, links with Buckinghamshire, and a strong desire to see Newclose host professional cricket matches. As a volunteer, and with others, that became my mission. Sadly that developing friendship was cut short in 2015 when, after a brief illness, Brian died.
Brian’s dream of his ground staging professional cricket came true three or four years later when Hampshire played a four-day match against Nottinghamshire at Newclose. He would have been thrilled to see Stuart Broad bowling, and shared my delight when last summer Newport CC filled a gap at local club level when they moved to Newclose.
I am truly living my Isle of Wight cricketing dream. The Island and the sport I love have given me all that I could want. What more could I ask for – except more volunteers to support our Newclose cricket charity?