Fred Raffle Was a Winner
The Leicestershire Cricket Society held is first meeting of the close season recently, and it was a cracker.
I try to get to as many of these meetings as possible, although I sometimes have other commitments of course.
This time the speaker was Fred Raffle. Not a household name, but actually one of the finest speakers I have experienced.
Fred is blind, and was accompanied by his splendid dog Barney,
He comes from Sunderland in the North East, and although Durham are now a force to be reckoned with in cricket terms, they were not at the time a first class county.
When he went to a specialist school for boys with no sight or partial sight, he was asked which cricket team he supported, and was horrified when people suggested it should be Yorkshire. But a friend supported Glamorgan, so Fred thought that he would too.
Fred had a hilarious fund of stories about playing cricket, organising cricket for the blind, and following the England team all around the world.
I enjoyed this one more than all the other splendid Cricket Society meetings that I have been to.
Posted by colin on Friday 17th October, 2008 at 8:04am