By Tony Hutton,
I first got to know Michael well when we both attended the Cricket Heritage course run by Peter Davies of the University of Huddersfield in the early months of 2006. His contribution to that course, before departing half way through to visit family in Australia, was outstanding.
He always approached any subject from a different direction to anyone else and his sense of humour always enlivened the proceedings. That summer, Peter Davies encouraged three of us to keep a diary of our cricket watching, which ended up as a book entitled "Off the beaten track "
Many professional cricket watchers seemed to like it and the 500 copies sold in no time. The final accolade came when we discovered a copy in the library at Lord's. Three very different characters came together to look at the places that surround cricket in their own way.
Mick, however, was never your conventional cricket watcher. He was rarely seen at Headingley and preferred the more obscure league grounds, particularly if junior or schoolboy teams were involved . He coached junior players and had been secretary of the Leeds Junior cricket league, first becoming involved I believe when his son took up the game.
One incident from the book summed it all up when we visited Greenmoor, the most southerly of the Huddersfield Central League grounds, on a windswept hilltop. As we entered the ground, the wicketkeeper ran off the field to shake hands with Mick who he remembered as his junior coach some ten years earlier.
He took great delight in telling the story of visiting a cricket match at an open prison in his native Lincolnshire, only to find that one of the umpires was none other than Jeffrey Archer.
In recent years he was the meticulous editor of the Northern Cricket Society yearbook. Everything had to be perfect before the copy finally went to the printers, particularly the correct use of apostrophes.
He was a man with very diverse interests outside cricket. He had been a careers master as a school teacher and one could imagine him always pointing his pupils in the right direction. His musical knowledge was rich and varied and he was an avid collector of classical composers' autographs. He would think nothing of shooting off to Paris for an auction if something he wanted came up.
He wrote to MPs and councillors on many subjects and probably watched more of the parliament channel on TV than he did the sport channels. Many of his letters were on the subject of school sport and the many misleading statistics put out by the government on how many schools played cricket.
He always had his own agenda , but sadly some of his ideas never came to fruition . For instance he was planning to write a history of the lost cricket grounds of Leeds and one of his outlandish ideas was for a cricket roller museum for all of those abandoned items in some corner of a cricket field.
A man full of surprises, who would always come up with the unexpected comment and one could see how his sense of humour would always have helped in coaching youngsters and when called upon to umpire them.
In modern parlance he was a man always thinking outside the box and for all those who watched and talked cricket in his company, life will never be the same again.
The photograph above is of an old roller in the West Bowling, Bradford ground. I am sure Mick would have liked it.
