FOREWORD by the Chairman, National Westminster Bank PLC.

We launched our cricket this summer with what all of us here will regard as an historical event and one which gave my colleagues and me enormous pleasure. The Bank invited members of England's Ashes winning team of the summer of 1953 to judge The Man of the Match awards in our First Round matches. We also gave a dinner for the players in the National Westminster Tower on the Monday evening prior to Wednesday's matches. We brought over Tony Lock from Australia and Willie Watson from South Africa so that all 18 players sat down to dinner for the first time together. Trevor Bailey has since described the occasion as one of those evenings when time stood still.

So successful has it all been that we felt it would be nice to commit 1953-1983 to posterity in the form of this publication "THIRTY YEARS ON." It spans the years from the First Test match of the 1953 series at Trent Bridge to a comprehensive coverage of The NatWest Trophy in 1983. We hope that cricket lovers everywhere will derive as much pleasure from these pages as we have at the Bank.

Lord Boardman - November 1983