Somerset Cricket Club – Players Gallery. Maurice Tremlett

Maurice Fletcher Tremlett (5 July 1923 – 30 July 1984) played for Somerset and England and was a fast-medium bowler who moved the ball off the pitch and a strong right-handed batsman.

He had been on the Somerset staff since before World War II and was finally picked for the first game of the 1947 season, at Lord’s against Middlesex. 

By the end of that first season, Tremlett had 656 runs and 65 wickets and he was chosen, with several other young cricketers, for the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) tour to the West Indies, where he opened the bowling in three of the four Test Matches. Unfortunately he was not a success, taking only four wickets and scoring just 20 runs in the Tests, and on the tour as a whole, his wickets were expensive and he scored few runs. Yet after another successful county season in 1948 – 1056 runs and 86 wickets, both at an improved average – he was picked for a second MCC tour in 1948–49, this time to South Africa.

After playing in South Africa, he was later one of many signatories in a letter to The Times on 17 July 1958 opposing ‘the policy of apartheid’ in international sport and defending ‘the principle of racial equality which is embodied in the Declaration of the Olympic Games’.

Over the next few years, Tremlett’s batting developed to the point where, in 1951, he scored more than 2,000 runs. In all, he scored 1,000 runs in a season ten times, however his bowling became more and more erratic until, by the mid 1950s, he was used only as an occasional change bowler. 

From 1956, he captained Somerset, their first professional skipper, charged with the job of restoring the fortunes of the county that had finished bottom of the Championship table for each of the preceding four seasons. As a captain, he was a great success, leading the side in 1958 to third position in the Championship, its highest placing ever. He stood down from the captaincy after the 1959 season.

Maurice Tremlett died in Southampton in 1984, at the age of 61.