John Jewell

Who was John Jewell?

John Mark Herbert Jewell, born at Bloemfontein, South Africa on 3 May 1917 and died at Durban, South Africa on 29 October 1946, played first-class cricket for Worcestershire in two matches in the 1939 season.

A right-handed middle-order batsman, Jewell played in the first first-class match of the West Indies tour, scoring 4 and 24 and taking two catches as Worcestershire won the match inside two days. His only other first-class game was the Whitsuntide match against Essex at Chelmsford in the middle of which the Worcestershire opening batsman Charles Bull was killed in a car crash and the wicketkeeper Syd Buller was severely injured. Worcestershire's two innings in the match both came after the tragedy, and were unsurprisingly unsuccessful; Jewell scored 2 and 0, and did not play first-class cricket again.

Jewell appears in Wisden Cricketers' Almanack's reports of the first-class matches as "P-O. M. Jewell", reflecting that he was at this stage a pilot officer in the Royal Air Force, which he joined in 1938. He appeared for the RAF's cricket team in 1939 in two non-first-class matches against the Royal Navy at Lord's and against the Army at Uxbridge. In the Lord's match he opened the innings and made 1 and 44. Against the Army, he made a duck in the first innings, but in the second he "hit brilliantly" to make an unbeaten 92 "in about an hour", taking his side to victory.