these Open Championship Clubs choose to relief grind - Pitchcare

Summer Sports - Cricket
SMITH family
are ROLLING on ...
“I’ll just get
myself together
and I’ll make
something”
84 PC FEBRUARY/MARCH 2012
Eric Smith, Swillington Rollers
After a lifetime spent collecting,
servicing, repairing and renovating,
there’s not much that Eric Smith doesn’t
know about cricket rollers. Now, this
enthusiastic ‘Fred Dibner’ of heavy
machinery and champion of cricket club
groundsmen has finally produced his
own, radical model.
Report by Carol Dutton
By rights, Eric and
Marlene Smith, the
husband and wife
team behind
Swillington Rollers,
should be happily installed in
a ‘winter sun’ resort, putting
their feet up and generally
enjoying a well earned
retirement. Instead, here
they are, on a cold day in
January, showing me around
their workshop on the
outskirts of Leeds, a building
that could almost double as a
museum to cricket wicket
rollers.
Eric possesses an almost
stereotypical Yorkshire accent
and, in conversation, will
intersperse his words with
‘lass’ or ‘lad’ as the situation
demands. “Here’s a 4AR
Auto-Roller. We put in new
hydraulic equipment,
renovate them and sell them
on,” Eric tells this lass, before
whisking me on to the next
machine, built by Stothert
and Pitt Ltd. in the 1960s.
His pride and joy is a Fowell
roller, which had served the
grass tennis courts of
Wimbledon for forty years.
“It was going to go in a
skip,” he says, in horror. A
magnificent Barford and
Perkins 3A Motor Roller
from the 1930s was saved
from a similar fate when Eric
rescued it from a scrap yard
ten years ago. Having
restored it to its former glory,
he donated it to the Shildon
Locomotion Museum, near
Consett in Co. Durham.
Ten minutes, a mug of
coffee and two chocolate
biscuits after my arrival, I’m
sitting on Eric’s new machine
testing its manoeuvrability.
“Go on, it’s easy lass,” he
urges, and he’s right.
Weighing half a tonne (the
weight increases to one tonne
according to the flatbed load
and thickness of the steel
used for the rollers), the
‘Supreme’ Swillington Roller
glides forward, back and
around with the lightest
touch of the lever.
A combined roller and
flatbed in one, the new
vehicle is the result of one of
those simple ideas, which
seem so obvious you’re
amazed that nobody’s
thought of it before. “Some
cricket grounds cover six to
eight acres and, in a lot of
cases, especially in the
smaller clubs, one
groundsman will be doing
everything,” Eric explains.
“With this machine, he can
put everything he needs on
the back - loam, line marking
equipment, water, even a
small mower.”
In appearance, it bears no
resemblance to any other
cricket roller currently
available in the UK, apart
from the traditional green
paint job. It is, basically, a
flatbed with a seat and an
engine, atop two small
diameter rollers. And it looks
bullet proof! As if to show the
sturdiness of his new
machine, the restored Fowell
roller is sat on the back of
one of the new models.