Background and Early Cricket Career
Kitchen was born in Nailsea, Somerset where his father played local club cricket. He was educated locally at Backwell Secondary Modern School. He joined the playing staff at Somerset County Cricket Club as a 16-year-old in 1957 and appeared in the next three seasons for the county's second eleven in Minor Counties matches and, from 1959, in games in the newly-constituted Second Eleven Championship.
He made his debut for the Somerset first eleven in 1960 as a middle-order batsman, but made little impact in that or the next season, and in 1962 and 1963, although he played in around half of Somerset's first-class matches, his batting average was below 20 and his place was often dependent on injuries to other players. At this stage in his career, he was primarily a defensive batsman "which suited neither his temperament, for he was not a selfish man, nor his technique", according to one history of Somerset cricket. He played in most of Somerset's matches in the 1964 season and finally averaged more than 20 runs per innings, but returned to inconsistent performances and an uncertain place in the team in 1965.
Read more about this topic: Mervyn Kitchen
Famous quotes containing the words background and, background, early, cricket and/or career:
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“... every experience in life enriches one’s background and should teach valuable lessons.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)
“Make-believe is the avenue to much of the young child’s early understanding. He sorts out impressions and tries out ideas that are foundational to his later realistic comprehension. This private world sometimes is a quiet, solitary
world. More often it is a noisy, busy, crowded place where language grows, and social skills develop, and where perseverance and attention-span expand.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)