Monty Cranfield

Lionel Montague Cranfield (29 August 1909 – 18 November 1993) played first-class cricket for Gloucestershire between 1934 and 1951. He was born in Bristol and died at , Greater Manchester.

Monty Cranfield was the son of Lionel Cranfield, who played first-class cricket for Gloucestershire and Somerset between 1903 and 1922, and the nephew of Beaumont Cranfield, who played for Somerset from 1897 to 1908 and who died just months before Monty was born.

Monty Cranfield was a right-arm leg break and off break bowler and a right-handed lower-order batsman who played fairly regularly for Gloucestershire both before and after the Second World War without ever really being certain of his place in the team. As a spin bowler, he coincided for much of his career with off-spinner Tom Goddard and then later with the slow left-arm spin bowler Sam Cook, both Test players and inevitable first-choice bowlers. As a result, he never achieved 50 wickets in a single English season, and nor did he ever bowl as many as 500 overs in a single season. As a batsman, though he often made useful runs, he had only one season, when he was 37 years old, when he was anywhere close to a front-line batsman.

Cranfield first appeared for Gloucestershire in 1934 and played in 17 first-class matches that season, making 305 runs at an average of 16.05 and taking 23 wickets at an average of 37.60. His first five-wicket haul came at Bristol against a Yorkshire team weakened by Test calls; he took five for 58 in the first innings, but scarcely bowled in the second innings as Reg Sinfield and Charles Parker shared the wickets between them. In 1935, Cranfield was awarded his county cap, though his season's figures were poor: 294 runs at an average of just 8.16 and only 10 wickets all season. He did, however, produce his first 50 in first-class cricket: an innings of exactly 50 against Derbyshire at Bristol. The batting got no better across the 1930s, and though Wisden noted in its review of Gloucestershire's 1936 season that "[Cranfield's] slow leg-breaks were often useful", the 35 wickets he took in that season were his best return in pre-war cricket. By 1939, he was playing mostly for Gloucestershire's second team in the Minor Counties, though he returned for the game against Cambridge University in June 1939 and took 10 wickets in the match for 88 runs, including a first-innings return of five for 33 which was at that stage his best in first-class cricket. Wisden's report that Cranfield was "flighting and spinning the ball from the off" suggests that he was bowling off spin at this stage.