Early Life and Career
Bedser was born a few minutes after his identical twin brother Eric (1918–2006) in Reading, Berkshire, where his father was stationed with the Royal Air Force. Within six months the family moved to Horsell, Surrey, where, at the age of seven, the brothers played their first organised cricket. Over the next decade they played together for Monument Hill School and Woking Cricket Club. After joining a local firm of solicitors, the twins were spotted practising in the nets for Woking Cricket Club by Surrey coach Alan Peach, and he recruited them to the staff at The Oval in 1938. A year later they made their first-class débuts for the county. Their careers were interrupted in 1939, when they joined the RAF to serve in World War II: they saw action at Dunkirk and later served in North Africa, Italy and Austria, both narrowly escaping from being shot in France. They were demobilised in 1946.
Read more about this topic: Alec Bedser
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or career:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The 19-year-old Diana ... decided to make her career that of wife. Today that can be a very, very iffy line of work.... And what sometimes happens to the women who pursue it is the best argument imaginable for teaching girls that they should always be able to take care of themselves.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)