Cranleigh parent Belinda Graham-Rack organised a very special charity cricket match at Cranleigh School on Sunday 8th June to raise money for the Longacre School Jubilee Appeal and three other charities: CHASE; the Crossroads Centre in Antigua (founded by Eric Clapton); and the English Schools’ Cricket Association. Cranleigh’s Enterprise Manager, David Waters, paid special praise to the Cranleigh School Ground Staff, “Denis Bloomfield and his team prepared a pitch worthy of a County Championship game, or even a Test match and the immaculate condition of the whole campus was a great credit to them. It is not every day you have megastars like these strolling around the School and it was great that the whole of the grounds looked so superb.”

 

Eric Clapton’s XI took on the famous charity fund-raising XI, the Bunburys and the starry names who graced the Cranleigh turf included: Bill Wyman, Mike Rutherford, Roger Waters, Mark Ramprakash, Phil Tufnell, Alan Lamb, Liam Botham, Chris Sutton, Lloyd Honeyghan, John Altman, Piers Morgan, John Inverdale and Cranleigh parent Mark Austin. The day was featured in the Surrey Advertiser and the West Sussex County Times and also the Sunday Times. David Walsh’s article in the last-named’s News Review section focused on Bill Wyman, now 71, who, in the Cranleigh game, clean-bowled Mark Ramprakash after he had been despatching most deliveries faced to the boundary (including a six off Head Guy Waller). The article began by painting a picture of this special day at Cranleigh: ‘Had you been travelling near the village of Cranleigh, Surrey, last Sunday, you could have followed the signs to the cricket match and made the most extraordinary discovery: on the finely cut grass of the cricket pitch, with families picnicking around the boundary, wearing white flannels against the white canvas of the Marquee, wasn’t that Mike Rutherford and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters, playing cricket with Guy Waller the Head of smart Cranleigh School?