The Almondbury Casuals Cricket Club was formed in 1949 or 1952 depending whether we accept myth and legend or the committee minutes. It is a gentlemen’s cricket club. It is not especially competitive, no one gets paid and it is not associated with any commercial venture. I joined the club around 1999. I am still a member, but somewhere between 2005 and 2006 I stopped playing cricket for them. Somewhere around 2012 they stopped playing as well.

In 2006 I studied cricket at The University of Huddersfield. Peter Davies was the lecturer, assisted by Rob Light. To start with we met one night of the week on the Huddersfield campus. During the second semester we rotated round local cricket clubs, for example, Hanging Heaton, Todmordon, Golcar, Thurstonland, and Illingworth. The subjects included cricket origins, the development of the laws and kit, ladies cricket, cricket during wartime, the influence of Caribbean and Sub-continentental immigrants on Kirklees and Calderdale cricket, and amateurs and professionals. The students were associated with league clubs, or were umpires, or in the case of the two senior guys, cricket lovers who went and watched cricket somewhere as many days of the year as they could. Though many league clubs do run a Sunday side, I was the only student from friendly non-league cricket. My presentation was about caribbean immigrants to England and West Yorkshire from 1948 into the 1950’s, and how their cricketers did or did not integrate into local league teams. Around 20 completed the course which was a small part of Peter’s project on the history of W. Yorkshire cricket – http://www.ckcricketheritage.org.uk.