Les Gwynne dominates the 1920s
Manly Warringah District Cricket Club | December 31, 2024
First-grade cricket at Manly in the 1920s was dominated by one player, Les Gwynne.
Les Gwynne started his first-grade career at the age of 17 with the Glebe Club in 1913, and when World War I broke out he went overseas where he became one of the Services Sports Board of Control in London, and assisted in the formation of the now famous A.I.F. cricket team, first captained by Charlie Kelleway and later by Herbie Collins. It was this team which brought players such as Jack Gregory and Bert Oldfield under the notice of State and Australian selectors for the first time.
Les was an excellent right hand opening batsman. He was a sound and orthodox player, possessing a full range of strokes, and was equally adept at hooking faster bowling and using his feet to dance down the pitch to play the spinners. In addition, he was a useful medium pace bowler with the happy knack of breaking stubborn partnerships, an excellent slip field and, being ambidextrous, could throw the ball from the boundary to the wickets equally well with either hand.
His batting was consistency itself, and his record suggests that he was extremely unfortunate not to have represented his State far more frequently than he did. A first-class average of 41 and an innings of 138 against South Australia on his Sheffield Shield debut showed that he certainly had the ability to succeed at the higher level.
In the five years from 1923-24 to 1927-28, Gwynne was at the peak of his career, scoring most runs for the Club in each of these seasons, including 843 runs in 1923-24 (a club record until surpassed by Jim Burke's 899 runs in 1968-69), 615 in 1925-26, and 708 in 1926-27. In addition, he secured the highest batting average in four of these five seasons, overall averaging about 40 runs per innings.
It was largely due to his efforts that our first-grade side was able to finish fourth and fifth respectively in 1923-24 and 1924-25 and, despite having a mediocre attack, finishing somewhere around the middle of the table in the remaining years to 1927-28. It was not just chance that the Club's two really poor years at the end of the decade coincided with a temporary loss of form by Gwynne.
Overall Gwynne hit 6,029 runs for Manly between 1923 and 1945 at 27.40. He hit 9 hundreds with a top score of 175*
