NATURAL TURF
Left: Dury when he first set out in groundscare. This pic: Dury worked on the cricket pitch at Nottinghamshire’s Trent Bridge ground
KAREN MAXWELL TALKS TO PETER DURY – INVENTOR OF THE ORIGINAL SYNTHETIC- TURF NOTTINGHAMSHIRE CRICKET PITCH – ABOUT HIS TREND-SETTING SERVICES TO GROUNDSMANSHIP
PETER LK DURY MBE
How and why did you join the groundsmanship profession? I played cricket as a teenager and rep- resented Nottinghamshire Boys and Derbyshire Boys while still at school, before joining Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club in 1951. When I returned to Trent Bridge after
doing my statutory four years’ of Na- tional Service however, the coach told me that I wouldn’t make the grade as a regu- lar club player. That’s when I turned my attention to groundscare. I became a member of the National
Association for Groundsmen, [now the Institute of Groundsmanship (IOG)], as one of the ground-staff at the British Cel- anese sports ground – a commercial firm now called Courthalls – where preparing and maintaining the square became my responsibility. I played football and crick- et for British Celanese and developed my practical groundsmanship experience. Having then joined Derby Parks on
general maintenance, I attended techni- cal college to learn the theory behind my chosen career. My big break came when I took the role as head groundsman at Southport and Birkdale Cricket Club, in Merseyside [or what was then Lancashire
County Cricket Club’s second ground] – where I stayed from 1961 to 1965. I moved to Nottingham County Coun-
cil’s Education department in 1968, after local government posts in Nuneaton and Huntingdon, where my role was to build and maintain sports surfaces across the county’s playing fields.
As the turf industry progressed it was obvious to me that
proper standards for the way pitches performed needed to be in place
How did you acquire your groundsmanship skills? Having become a member of the IOG, I started to learn my trade in Sports Ground and Landscape Management at Derby Technical College. I then embarked on some self study when I moved to Not- tinghamshire County Council in 1968, as county playing fields officer, and became
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the fourth person in the country to be presented with the Institute of Grounds- manship (IOG) Diploma in Turf Culture and Sports Grounds Management. It was around this time that I got
involved in producing performance stan- dards – for both natural and synthetic turf. In fact I believe that it was due to my time progressing both national and international performance standards that I was awarded an MBE for services to groundsmanship earlier this year.
How have groundscare procedures changed over the years? Nowadays procedures are way ahead of what they were when I first started out. We make more use today of highly technical machinery and materials; for example sand is used in the pitch con- struction and synthetic fibres are used to stabilise natural turf pitches. During my groundscare career, Not-
tinghamshire County Council has been very open-minded about allowing me and my team to develop a variety of dif- ferent pitch constructions, based on sand or equivalent materials. In fact, our team was involved with the first floodlit cricket pitch at Stamford Bridge in 1981.
Issue 4 2012 © cybertrek 2012
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