Early Life
Harold Larwood was born on 14 November 1904 in the Nottinghamshire village of Nuncargate, near the coal mining town of Kirkby-in-Ashfield. He was the fourth of five sons born to Robert Larwood, a miner, and his wife Mary, née Sharman. Robert was a man of rigid principles, a disciplinarian teetotaller who was treasurer of the local Methodist chapel. His chief pastime was playing cricket for the village team, which he captained. Harold Larwood's biographer Duncan Hamilton writes that for Robert, cricket represented, "along with his dedication to God ... the core of his life".
From the age of five, Harold attended Kirkby Woodhouse school. Over the years this small village school produced, besides Larwood, four other international cricketers who became his contemporaries in the Nottinghamshire county side: William "Dodge" Whysall, Sam Staples, Bill Voce and Joe Hardstaff junior. On leaving the school in 1917, when he was 13, Harold was employed at the local miners' cooperative store, before beginning work the following year at Annesley Colliery in charge of a team of pit ponies. He had shown an early talent for cricket, and began to play for Nuncargate's second team in 1918. Playing against experienced adults, in his first season he took 76 wickets at an average of 4.9. By 1920 he was in the first team, alongside his father, playing in plimsolls because the family could not afford to buy him proper cricket boots.
Read more about this topic: Harold Larwood
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“...he came towards them early in the morning, walking on the sea.”
—Bible: New Testament, Mark 6:48.
“I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearingit being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.”
—Mary Wortley, Lady Montagu (16891762)