Reminiscing cricket at Buxton

We travelled up in my Dad’s Ford Anglia most of the time, the one that he’d got when he passed his driving test after a few years on a motor bike. The latter wasn’t much use to get the four of us around, so his first car was special and lasted us for around nine or ten years from 1967.

We lived at Ripley until 1970, when Dad’s work at the pit meant a move to a council house only a mile away from it, one they still live in to this day. It didn’t matter too much which house we left from, as a trip to Buxton was a fairly long haul either way.

I enjoyed the drive up there, the anticipation of the game ahead keeping my mind off car sickness, something that affected me throughout childhood (for that matter, to some extent until I started to drive myself).

I enjoyed the scenery en route and we’d listen to the radio as we chatted, the classic sounds of the era with me to this day. Let’s Go To San Francisco, I Can’t Let Maggie Go, Build Me Up Buttercup - in my mind’s eye these tunes played on repeat, though they will have been a small percentage of the ones we listened to and only for a year or so. I loved them all, though my old man’s preference would have been music from an earlier vintage; big bands, Crosby, Sinatra, Mills Brothers, Ink Spots.

The Bowl at Buxton was special as we’d made that special effort to get there, though Dad always studied the weather before we set off. It seemed to have its own climate, as evidenced by that freakish day of snow there on June 2, 1975. We didn’t go up there that day (Dad was pretty good at this weather lark by that stage) but we’d been on the Saturday, when Lancashire racked up 477-5 in the day, with Clive Lloyd hitting 167.

The great West Indian slaughtered us and I remember sixes going to all corners. Having checked up on it, at one point he hit seven sixes in the course of 50 runs scored, and he was especially severe on a young Geoff Miller, whose 14 overs went for 94 runs.

Our first trip had been exciting and perhaps fuelled my love of the game, with a fairly ordinary Derbyshire batting side hitting 400-4 on the first day, against Somerset (a strange venue for such a game) in 1968.

Both Mike Page and Derek Morgan scored centuries in what was as close to cavalier batting as we saw in those days, and after good bowling by Brian Jackson and Harold Rhodes, we finally won by just two wickets after being only set 70-odd to win. It was a game that emphasised the uncertainty of Derbyshire batting, though I would have to say the latter was more typical of my early experiences.

In 1969 we went up for another game against Somerset, but this time in the fledgling John Player League. Forty overs on a Sunday afternoon, starting at 2pm. Lovely.

We only made 151 but quick bowling by Alan Ward and Harold Rhodes reduced them to 38-6, the wickets including a young Greg Chappell, who had a season of contrasts ahead of a glittering international career.

We won by 52 runs, with Rhodes returning figures of 8-3-11-3 and Fred Rumsey, who had left Somerset at the end of the previous season and joined Derbyshire for a one-day deal, had 8-3-14-2. Any resemblance to modern one-day cricket was accidental.