Background and Early Cricket Career
Mann was educated at the Michaelhouse boarding school in South Africa and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University. He came to the fore in golf first and at the age of 16 he won the Natal Amateur Golf Championship. He won a blue for golf in the annual match between Cambridge University and Oxford University. He did not play cricket for the University's first team; he played in the Freshman's trial match, but did not take any wickets and was not tried again.
Back in South Africa the following winter, however, Mann made his first-class cricket debut for Natal in five games in the 1939-40 season and bowled economically in them, though he did not take more than three wickets in any one innings.
Mann served in the Second World War and was captured in the fighting in Italy; he escaped from a prisoner of war camp and was "hidden by peasants", according to his obituary in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack. He kept a large diary of his exploits in wartime and on his cricket visit to England in 1951 was attempting to sell his memoirs. In his will published after his death in 1952 he left £400 to two Italian farmers who had sheltered him in the North Italian marshes after he had escaped.
After war service, Mann returned to Natal but, as in 1939-40, in his three matches for the team in 1945-46 he failed to take more than three wickets in an innings. A move to Eastern Province in 1946-47 brought immediate dividends. In his first match for his new team, he took six wickets in Transvaal's first innings at a cost of 69 runs; more remarkable by modern standards was the economy, for the wickets, five of them Test batsmen, came in 67.6 eight-ball overs, 38 of which were maidens. At the time, the 542 balls he bowled were the most in any single innings in first-class cricket. He followed that with six for 126 against another Test-batsman-filled team, Natal, in the next match. The bowling won him a place in the 1947 South African team to England.
Read more about this topic: Tufty Mann
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