'Lucky' Jim Pleass: The Memoirs of Glamorgan's 1948 Championship Winner: 2 (Cricket in Wales) - Softcover

'Reading this fascinating book, I can but only admire Jim's contributions during Glamorgan's Championship-winning summer of 1948 or his efforts with the bat against the 1951 South Africans at Swansea - [without him] I can only wonder at how different the course of Glamorgan's cricketing history might have been...But Jim was not only an unsung hero on the cricketing fields of Wales and England, he was also one of many thousands of people who heroically took part in the Normandy Landings of June 1944.' Robert Croft, from his Foreword

Jim Pleass is the last surviving member of Glamorgan's County Championship winning team of 1948, the first time the Welsh team won the highest honour in county cricket. The Cardiff-born multi-talented sportsman, who was also an exceptional footballer and offered trial games for Cardiff City as a schoolboy, built a reputation as a solid and reliable team player at a time when Glamorgan was establishing itself on the first class cricket scene after the Second World War. In stark contrast to contemporary sport which is too often dominated by money and celebrity, Jim was a hard-working professional sportsman typical of his era, who simply enjoyed the camaraderie and of the game he loved. Yet the man who was born in Cardiff in 1923 achieved something that only a handful of the five hundred or so people who have proudly worn the daffodil-sweater since the Club's formation in 1888, can claim to have also matched, winning some sixty summers after the Club's creation their first-ever County Championship title. Jim was a very lucky man, as the book explains his narrow escape from certain death when he stormed the Normandy beaches on D day in 1944. If it wasn't for the over-exuberance of a driver on another landing craft, Jim would never have graced the cricket field wearing the daffodil of Glamorgan County Cricket Club.