Harold Gimblett - Postwar County Stalwart

Postwar County Stalwart

In the eight seasons after the Second World War Gimblett was the mainstay of the Somerset batting. Without taming his aggressive instincts, he had become more judicious in his shot selection, and though he remained until the end of his career likely to smash the first ball of a match for six, he also took on the role of senior batsman in a Somerset side that was usually weak in batting. In the 1946 season, Somerset's best for more than 50 years, he made 1947 runs at an average of 49.92 runs per innings, the highest seasonal average of his career. There were seven centuries, the most of any season, and they included 231 against Middlesex at Taunton, his first double century and part of what Wisden termed a "merciless onslaught" by the Somerset batsmen.

The return in 1947 was lower, but in 1948, with the Somerset batting seeming ever more dependent on him for runs, he responded with all of the four centuries scored by the team in the summer, and one of them was his own highest score and the highest innings made to that stage by a Somerset batsman: 310 against Sussex at Eastbourne. The previous Somerset record had been 292, set by the late Victorian era amateur Lionel Palairet. Gimblett told his biographer David Foot, on the tapes that form the backbone of the biography, that he had said on the pitch at Eastbourne to Sussex player James Langridge: "Well, that's got rid of one amateur's name in our county's record books." Gimblett went on to say that a collection had been proposed to mark the feat, but that Somerset's secretary had been dismissive of the idea. "I think that was when I first decided that my career with Somerset was going to end. I was deeply hurt," he said.

But it didn't end quite yet. In 1949, Gimblett passed 2000 runs for the season for the first time in his career, his 2093 in the season being a new record for Somerset at the time. He also hit two centuries in a match for the first time in his career, with 115 and an unbeaten 127 in the game against Hampshire at Taunton. "The feeling that if he got out almost all was over never affected his play," Wisden commented of his efforts across the season.

The pattern was repeated in 1950, but with an odd mid-season twist. The England Test side was being outplayed by the West Indies, and specifically by two previously unknown spin bowlers, Sonny Ramadhin and Alf Valentine. After a bad defeat in the second Test at Lord's, the England selectors sent for Gimblett for the third match at Trent Bridge with the apparent aim of having him hit the two spinners out of their rhythm. It would have been Gimblett's first Test for 11 years and the move, according to Foot, was highly popular, and not just in Somerset. But just before the match, Gimblett developed a large boil, a "carbuncle", on the back of his neck. He was dosed with penicillin and travelled to Nottingham. "A nation's sporting press meticulously documented the carbuncle's throb-rate," Foot writes. It was to no avail: Gimblett withdrew from the match, and was not picked again.

At the end of the 1950 English season, however, he ventured abroad for the first time, taking part in a Commonwealth tour of India and Sri Lanka and opening the batting in all five of the representative games. He had some success on the tour, scoring one century, the only one of the 50 centuries in his career not to be made for Somerset. Perhaps more typically, he was homesick and unhappy: "At first I wondered whether I'd picked up a bug. But it was purely mental," he said in a tape transcribed in his biography. Lighter by about 12 kg, he struggled for runs more than usually in the 1951 season, and took a long break from cricket in July, returning to some form afterwards.

Somerset awarded Gimblett a benefit match in 1952, though perhaps typically he grumbled that it was not the potentially lucrative bank holiday local derby match with Gloucestershire but the game with Northamptonshire at Glastonbury that he was allocated. Gimblett made a century in that match and had, in terms of run aggregate, his best-ever season in 1952. He scored 2134 runs in all matches, at an average of 39.51. Against Derbyshire at Taunton, he became the first Somerset player to hit two centuries in a match twice, scoring 146 and 116 in a drawn game.

If 1952 was a good season for Gimblett, then it was a poor one for his team. After several years in which the side had defied predictions and finished mid-table in the County Championship, Somerset fell to bottom place in 1952, and stayed there for four years. But Gimblett's own performance drew one of the game's accolades: in the 1953 edition of Wisden, he was named one of the Five Cricketers of the Year, alongside Tom Graveney, David Sheppard, Stuart Surridge and Fred Trueman.

The 1953 season, with 19 Championship defeats, was even worse than 1952: Gimblett's own performance was maintained, though three matches missed through injury meant his aggregate fell a little, but he "seldom received adequate support from his colleagues", wrote Wisden. The unbeaten 167 he made against Northamptonshire at Taunton was the 50th century of his first-class career. At the end of the 1953 season he played festival cricket at Hastings and Kingston and Wisden's notes on Somerset in 1954 announced that he had "accepted a five-year contract to remain with the club".