Tufty Mann

Norman Bertram Fleetwood "Tufty" Mann (28 December 1920 – 31 July 1952) was a South African cricketer who played in 19 Test matches from 1947 to 1951.

Tall, thin and bespectacled, Tufty Mann was a lower-order right-handed batsman and a slow left-arm orthodox spin bowler.

Back in South Africa the following winter, however, Mann made his first-class cricket debut for Natal in five games in the 1939–40 season and bowled economically in them, though he did not take more than three wickets in any one innings.

Mann served in the Second World War and was captured in the fighting in Italy; he escaped from a prisoner of war camp and was "hidden by peasants", according to his obituary in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack.

After war service, Mann returned to Natal but, as in 1939–40, in his three matches for the team in 1945–46 he failed to take more than three wickets in an innings.

He played first-class cricket for Natal in the seasons immediately before and after the Second World War, and then played for Eastern Province from 1946 to 1947.

A move to Eastern Province in 1946–47 brought immediate dividends.

In his first match for his new team, he took six wickets in Transvaal's first innings at a cost of 69 runs; more remarkable by modern standards was the economy, for the wickets, five of them Test batsmen, came in 67.6 eight-ball overs, 38 of which were maidens.

At the time, the 542 balls he bowled were the most in any single innings in first-class cricket.

He followed that with six for 126 against another Test-batsman-filled team, Natal, in the next match.

But more than two-thirds of his 73 first-class games were for South Africa, on tours to England in 1947 and 1951 and in home series against England and Australia.

Born in Benoni, Transvaal, Mann was educated at the Michaelhouse boarding school in South Africa and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University.

He came to the fore in golf first and at the age of 16 he won the Natal Amateur Golf Championship.

He won a blue for golf in the annual match between Cambridge University and Oxford University.

He did not play cricket for the University's first team; he played in the Freshman's trial match, but did not take any wickets and was not tried again.

The bowling won him a place in the 1947 South African team to England.

The 1947 English cricket season was dominated by the batting exploits of Denis Compton and Bill Edrich, who both broke records for the numbers of runs scored in a season.

Mann's accuracy was one of the few factors that could subdue the English pair, and his first bowling in Test cricket, in the first game of the five-match series, was a spell of eight successive maidens; he finished the innings with figures of no wickets for 10 runs in 20 overs.

He followed that up when England followed on with second-innings figures of one for 94 in 60 overs: the single wicket that he took was that of Compton, but Compton had made 163 by that stage and the match was easily saved.

The first Test figures illustrated Mann's value to the South African side, but also his limitations.

"Mann rarely departed from his orthodox going-away ball on the middle or off stump and on account of his low trajectory batsmen seldom were able to get to the pitch," Wisden wrote.

In a sunny, warm summer, Mann was often used as a defensive bowler, but when there was a helpful wicket, he was at times able to impart some spin to the ball: Wisden recorded in the third Test, as England chased a small target for victory on a worn pitch, that "Mann's left-arm leg-breaks began to turn nastily... Hutton and Compton found this to their cost" as Mann dismissed both before the match was won by England.

In the Test series as a whole, which England won by three matches to nil, with two draws, Mann was the South Africans' most successful bowler, taking 15 wickets at an average of 40.20 and bowling 329.5 overs: an economy rate of 1.83 runs an over.

He conceded less than two runs an over when Edrich (189) and Compton (208) shared a third-wicket partnership of 370 in the second Test, and ended the stand by bowling Edrich, his only wicket in the match.

His best bowling return of the series in a single innings came in the fourth game, when he took four for 68 in 50 overs in England's first innings.

And in the final match he took four for 93 in 64 overs and followed that up with two for 102 in 27 overs – England were hitting out to secure a declaration in a high-scoring match that ended as a draw.

In all first-class matches, Mann took 74 wickets at an average of 25.25 and bowled 351 maiden overs.

He had particular success in a late-season match against Kent when he followed first-innings bowling of six for 132 with a second-innings return of seven for 95.

His batting was occasionally successful too: against Glamorgan he hit 97 in 55 minutes, including a six and 13 fours, and was out to "a deep-field catch" going for his century.

This would remain his highest first-class score.

Mann returned to South Africa for the 1947–48 domestic cricket season and in the first game took the best bowling figures of his career: eight for 59 against Western Province.

For the two seasons that followed, however, domestic cricket took a back-seat to the tours of South Africa by, in 1948–49, an England team and then in 1949–50, a team from Australia.

Mann played in all 10 Tests on these two tours and in only a single other first-class match in each season, and those other games were also against the touring sides.

In the series against England, Mann headed the South African bowling averages, though with 17 wickets he took fewer than Cuan McCarthy and Athol Rowan.

Played mainly on batsman-friendly pitches and with the South Africans in particular often batting very defensively, the series was won by England by 2–0 with three drawn matches and there was a lot of bowling for South Africa's main three bowlers.

It was in this series, when a particularly drawn-out innings by the England captain George Mann ended with his dismissal by Tufty Mann that broadcaster John Arlott summed up the innings as "a case of Mann's inhumanity to Mann".

Mann's best bowling figures came in the tight first match which was affected by rain and which England won very narrowly by two wickets: he took six first-innings wickets for 59 runs, but in the second innings he and Rowan, who had taken the other four wickets in the first innings, were hampered by a wet ball and bowled very little.

Conditions got easier for batsmen in the next match: Mann had a spell in which he took three middle-order English wickets while only 10 runs were added, but the score was 540 for three before the first of these wickets fell, and they were his only wickets of the match.

He kept a large diary of his exploits in wartime and on his cricket visit to England in 1951 was attempting to sell his memoirs.

In his will published after his death in 1952 he left £400 to two Italian farmers who had sheltered him in the North Italian marshes after he had escaped.