15 Dec 2014 | Cricket
Not many Welshmen can tell stories about surving the Normandy beaches of D-Day, dodging explding Nazi mines and going on to win cricket's County Championship, but "Lucky" Jim Pleass can.
The 92-year-old WWII veteran is the only surviving member of Glamorgan's historic Championship winning team of 1948.
Born the son of an insurance manager in Splott Road, Cardiff, in 1923, Lucky Jim's extraordinary life encompassed both the horrors of the 1939-45 conflict and the greatest moments in Welsh cricket.
As well as being part of Glamorgan's only Championship win, Pleass would also be part of the Glamorgan team which defeated South Africa at St Helens, Swansea, in 1951.
And in 1955 he became the first Glamorgan player to score a century on Yorkshire soil, making 102 at Harrogate in the Welsh team's first ever victory in Yorkshire.
Now a new book, Lucky Jim Pleass : The Memoirs of Glamorgan's 1948 Championship Winner written by Glamorgan archivist Andrew Hignell tells the astonishing story of a Welsh hero both on and off the sports pitch.
Speaking of arriving at Gold Beach on June 6, 1944, Pleass said: The grey sky was lit up by the flashes of rockets, plus shells of all sizes and what seemed like hundreds of flares.
The sea was scarcely to be seen, covered as it was by an array of ships, some of them firing at coastal targets, others disgorging armies of men into landing craft.
Speaking of the escape which earned him his nickname, Pleass described how shortly after D-Day he was manning an Oerlikon Anti-Aircraft gun in the bows of a ship.
He said: As we cleaved through the water a small landing craft carrying a group of senior officers sped past us swiftly cutting across our bows but it promptly hit a mine and disintegrated into nothing.
Had it not been for the landing craft going in front of us, we would have reached that point within a minute.
The only evidence of the disaster was was a motley collection of ripped clothing and headgear floating on the water.
Ex Glamorgan and England spinner, Swansea's Robert Croft, said of the memoirs: Reading this fascinating book I can but only admire Jim's contributions during Glamorgan's Championship winning summer of 1948 and his efforts with the bat against the 1951 South Africans at Swansea.
Without him I can only wonder at how different the 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.
Right handed batsman Jim Pleass's first love was football, not cricket. He played as a right-winger and represented Fairwater Boys and Canton High School before joining Cardiff Corinthians FC and having trials for Cardiff City.
After giving up cricket Pleass spent many years working in business in Cardiff.
Lucky Jim Pleass: The Memoirs of Glamorgan's 1948 Championship Winner by Andrew Hignell (St David's Press, £14.99) is out now.