Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy Final Scorecard 30 August 2003

Signed by 16 Gloucestershire Captains

After the match which Gloucestershire won by seven wickets a group of us were standing chatting at
the back of the pavilion at Lord’s and Tom Pugh came and said hello to us. It was the first time that
I’d met him and I asked him to sign my 2003 Playfair on the Gloucestershire records page (His
second wicket partnership of 256 with Tom Graveney at Chesterfield 1960 is still a Club record for
the second wicket) only to find that I didn’t have it with me.

Having just purchased a printed scorecard of the game, I got him to sign that instead. By the time
that we left Lord’s, we’d seen Tony Wright and Mark Alleyne, both of whom also signed.
It was a few weeks later that I realised that the three signatures were the current and two former
captains so I checked up to see how many other former captains were still living and how easy it
might be to get them all to sign. There were eleven names.

The majority were straightforward. Tom Graveney I saw regularly at Cheltenham Cricket Society
meetings and David Graveney, Arthur Milton, John Mortimore, Tony Brown and Jack Russell usually
attended Old Players reunions.

That just left Bill Athey of the English based players and the remainder were based elsewhere.
John Chadd, a former Worcestershire chairman (I’m not too proud to admit that I’m a Worcs
member as well as Glos) put me in touch with Tom Bailey, Sir Derrick’s son, who farms just outside
of Hereford and Tom took the card to Alderney where Sir Derrick signed it at his 90 th birthday party. I
took it with me to South Africa in 2009 in the hope that I might see Mike Procter at one of the two
Tests I went to watch. I almost literally bumped into him in Durban where he signed.

At the time I was a member of the Gloucestershire Executive Board, seeing quite a bit of David
Graveney and when he mentioned that he was going to the States to see Ken for Father’s Day, it was
too good an opportunity to miss and he was glad to take it with him.
So, just Courtney Walsh and Bill Athey to go. Andy Brassington is the Glos Old Players supremo and,
talking to him just after David Graveney had brought the card back from the States, I asked him if he
was in contact with either of the final two.

To my delight he said that he was seeing Courtney the following week at Northampton where Old
Glos were playing Old Northants in a Charity fundraiser in memory of Kevin Curran.
That left just Bill Athey. When I was Treasurer of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and
Historians I got to know Roger Mann, an avid collector of cricket memorabilia and chatting to him
one evening, the scorecard came into the conversation. You can imagine my delight when he said
that he would shortly be seeing Bill. He was more than happy to get Bill to sign it to complete the
set.

The card is also signed by Jon Lewis and Alex Gidman who both played in the game and went on to
become captains.

Sir Derek Bailey	1951-1952
C A Milton	1967
C A Walsh	1993 1994 1996
T W Graveney	1959-1960
A S Brown	1968-1976
R C Russell	1995
C T M Pugh	1961-1962
M J Procter	1977-1981
M W Alleyne	1997-2005
J K R Graveney	1963
D A Graveney	1982-1988
J Lewis	2006-2008
J B Mortimore	1964-1966
C W J Athey	1989
A P R Gidman	2009-2012
A J Wright	1990-1993