Bryan ‘Bomber’ Wells, an off-spin bowler for Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire, was one of the funniest and most eccentric county cricketers of the 1950s and 1960s. Overweight and undertrained, Bomber Wells could hardly have looked less like a professional sportsman. This unathletic impression was confirmed by his bowling run-up, or rather his lack of run-up. As he himself explained, he took two steps when he was cold and one when he was hot; and sometimes he simply delivered the ball from a stationary position. Once at Worcester, by pre-arrangement with Roly Jenkins, who was batting, Wells managed to bowl an entire over while the cathedral clock struck twelve. Sir Derrick Bailey, 3rd Baronet, the Gloucestershire captain, was furious, and complained to Wells that he was making the game look ridiculous. Bomber was ordered to start his run from eight paces back. He obeyed but then bowled the ball – spot on to a length – after taking only a couple of paces. ‘Sir Derrick went berserk,’ Bomber recalled with satisfaction. ‘He dropped me for two matches, but it was worth it.’
Inevitably, many batsmen were unprepared for Bomber’s delivery. Playing as a young man for the Gloucestershire Nondescripts against Witney, he bowled out a batsman called Len Hemming, who was immediately called back as he had not seemed to be ready. With the next ball Bomber bowled him out again. ‘If you think I’m staying here for him to get his bloody hat-trick,’ Hemming told the fielders, ‘you’ve got another think coming.’ Years later Hemming was asked about this story. ‘I’ve no recollection of it at all,’ he said, ‘but I’m all in favour of it.’ Playing against Essex in the county championship, Wells encountered a young amateur who stepped away from the crease whenever he began to bowl. So, in Bomber’s own words, ‘I ran all the way round the square, past mid-on, square leg, behind the ’keeper, back to mid-off, and I shouted, “Are you ready now?” And I bowled him first ball.’ These, and many other stories about Bomber Wells are to be found in Stephen Chalke’s wonderfully evocative memoir, One More Run (2000). The book also makes it clear, however, that Bomber Wells was a very fine bowler.
Oddly for such a thickset man, he had small hands, and seemed to spin the ball from the palm rather than the fingers. ‘He was the only bowler I’ve ever seen,’ remembered his Gloucestershire colleague Arthur Milton, ‘who made the ball pitch further up to you than it looked. He had such a quick arm action that the ball would be on you, half a yard further up than you thought.’ Many batsmen were trapped lbw on the back foot. It was Wells’s misfortune, though, that in his time Gloucestershire had two other fine off-spinners in John Mortimore and David Allen, both of whom played for England. In order to be sure of regular county championship cricket Wells moved to Nottinghamshire in 1960. Yet his bowling average for Gloucestershire – 544 wickets at 21.18 each – was better than either Mortimore’s (1,696 wickets at 22.69) or Allen’s (882 wickets at 22.13). Many county cricketers, including so hardened a professional as Brian Close, felt that Wells’s unpredictability made him the most dangerous of the three. He was always changing his pace, and would mix off-spin with away swingers and leg-breaks. ‘It used to bore me silly to bowl two balls the same,’ he said. What counted against him in some eyes was his inability to be anything but his own man, or to play the game for any other reason but enjoyment. A man capable, during tense moments on the field, of creeping up behind his fiercely disciplinarian county captain George Emmett and saying ‘Boo’, was never going to be entirely acceptable in the grim grind of professional cricket.
His attitude to batting never changed. He had one shot – the slog. ‘If I hit the ball,’ Bomber explained, ‘it went a long way and the crowd and I were happy. If I missed it, well, I was that much nearer bowling.’ Team-mates were frequently driven to fury by his running between the wickets. ‘Can’t you say anything?’ Sam Cook once shouted, stranded in mid-pitch by Bomber’s failure to call. ‘Goodbye,’ Bomber volunteered.
Wells made his debut for Gloucestershire against Sussex at Bristol, and Sir Derrick Bailey evidently did not have much confidence in the newcomer, for Bomber came on as sixth change bowler. Almost immediately, however, he claimed his first victim, David Sheppard, the future Bishop of Liverpool. At the end of the innings his figures were six for 47. ‘Well,’ he told his new team-mates in the pavilion, ‘I can see if I’m going to play for this side, I’m going to have to do a lot of bowling. I shall have to cut my run down.’
Many counselled against the move to Nottinghamshire, arguing that the wicket at Trent Bridge was too favourable to batsmen. But Bomber found he preferred it to the slower pitches at Bristol; he also preferred the food at Trent Bridge, finding it a great advance on ‘the little salads we used to have every day at Bristol: one slice of cold meat so thin you could see through it’. Eating, he confessed, was his second pastime.
Wells retired in 1965, having taken, as he was told, 999 wickets in 302 first-class matches. Offered a game against Gloucestershire to make up the thousand – ‘somebody down there will give you their wicket’ – he demurred. ‘Plenty of people have got a thousand wickets,’ he reflected, ‘I bet no one’s got 999.’ Later, however, it was discovered he had only taken 998.
Bryan Douglas Wells: b Gloucester, 27 July 1930; d 19 June 2008