Summer Sports - Cricket
Old and new - Wimbledon’s old Fowell roller on the back of the new Supreme
Customers can choose rollers of varying thickness according to their anticipated flatbed loads, which will affect the overall weight on the ground. Eric’s customer on the Isle of Man has ordered the lightest rollers with steel 8mm thick, as he is intending to use the flatbed facility to the full. Headingley and Dulwich College, who already have a ‘Supreme’ machine, chose the standard steel rollers at 10mm. With a 9hp Honda engine, full hydraulics and a top speed of three miles per hour, the new machine is light enough for pre- season rolling, but the weight can be increased by loading the flatbed as the season goes on. “Groundsmen are the heroes of our sports fields, especially when it comes to cricket,” Eric maintains. “Often, I’ve said to the smaller clubs, ‘just pay for delivery and give me the rest when you get your grant’, but, nowadays, there isn’t the grant money available.” However warm and generous an individual might be (and, having met Eric and Marlene, I can personally vouch for the fact that the couple are both), fate is indiscriminate in its dealings as, in 2007, Marlene was diagnosed with breast cancer. Having been married for over forty years and raised two sons during good times and bad, Marlene is definitely the ‘power behind the throne.’ She reacted to the news in a matter of fact fashion, opting to have a mastectomy. “After the biopsy results, I was told that lumps are graded from one to five, and my lump was a grade four,” she remembers. “I had the choice of having a
A restored Aveling Barford roller
mastectomy or not, and I told the specialist to ‘take it all off.’ It’s my life and my body.”
Having dealt with the crisis single handed up until this point, once home and undergoing chemotherapy, Marlene needed the support of Eric and her sons who, she confides, had both been in denial. “My GP told Eric that I couldn’t fight the disease on my own,” Marlene says and, after that moment, they tackled her illness together. Three years ago the couple downsized to a bungalow, and the move has proved a resounding success. Marlene’s health gradually improved and she began fundraising for Macmillan Nurses. Last year she helped raise £11,000; £2,000 coming from roller spare parts sold by Eric. He is immensely proud of his wife, and they are both looking forward to the day, hopefully this June, when Marlene will be given the all clear. A year after the move, Eric, with the help of his eldest son Simon, began work on his new roller. “I thought, I’ll just get myself together and I’ll make something,” he recalls.
Engineering is in Eric’s blood. His father worked at Fowlers in the days when this whole area of Leeds was dedicated to engine manufacture, housing not only Fowlers, but Greens, McLaren’s and Hunslets. “Dad was a part of it,” says Eric. Once the war started, Mr. Smith senior became part of the effort to keep up moral. “I grew up on the fairgrounds of Lancashire and Liverpool. Most of them had shut down, and it was important to keep the ones that were left
running. Dad was their resident engineer,” Eric explains. “I went to any number of different schools.” The new roller gets its name from a Mrs Deacon who ordered a showman’s traction engine from Fowlers during the time that Eric’s dad worked there. It was one of the first to be built with a chrome spiral trim. Mrs Deacon insisted that the trim was the wrong height and had to be trimmed down. Only when this had been accomplished would she accept her new machine. “It’s the ‘Supreme’ engine,” she said, little knowing that the name would be resurrected in 2011. Gone are the days of huge hand rollers.
“Times have changed and standards have gone up,” Eric says. “I’ve watched old men struggle on cricket pitches for years. I remember one guy (he’s ninety years old and retired now), at Sherburn cricket club, using the front roller from a steam engine. Another club actually used a15 tonne machine up and down the wicket!” Eric’s ‘Supreme’ roller is the result of years of experience and a sound knowledge of the needs of cricket club groundsmen. Now that he has produced his own design, do the couple have any thoughts on retirement? “Eric will never retire” says Marlene, and perhaps that’s just as well. Judging by the reaction to this first new roller to come out of Leeds for over forty years - Headingley’s Head Groundsman, Andy Fogarty, has been quoted as saying, “It’s a good, compact machine” and “it’s like two rollers in one” - the Smith family are going to be too busy.
A restored Greens roller
An illustration of the Barford & Perkins 3A donated to Consett Locomotion Museum
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2012 PC 85
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