Chapter Nineteen The Record Holders With Woolley in full flow and Freeman’s sorcery baffling all but the very best of batsmen, Kent’s holiday cricket offered a vivid contrast to the grim encounters between York and Lancaster and the fast bowling confrontations at Trent Bridge and The Oval. They never won the Championship between the wars, being runners-up in 1919 and 1928 and finishing in the first five 16 times, yet undisputedly remained in the Big Six. Dudley Carew, who so evocatively captured the spirit of the game in the 1930s, said that nowhere in the country – Yorkshire and Lancashire certainly not excepted – did partisanship run as high as in Kent. “The game is even more talked of and the day’s play more disputed in Kentish pubs than in the pubs of Bradford or Nottingham,” he wrote. There was plenty to discuss. Frank Woolley, tall, stately, the supremely graceful left-handed batsman. Alfred Percy ‘Tich’ Freeman, a stocky little chain-smoking gnome of a man, who first played in 1914 and was 31 when cricket resumed after the war. Wonderfully controlled leg breaks, with a well-disguised googly or top spinner, perfect length and cunning flight, brought Freeman remarkable success, a peak of 304 wickets in 1928 part of a sequence in which he snared 2,090 victims in eight English seasons. Later Leslie Ames would emerge as one of the greatest wicket-keeper-batsmen of all time, forging from 1927 a famous partnership with Freeman, victims succumbing, caught or stumped by Ames or gobbled up by Woolley at slip. Kent’s holiday opponents were usually Hampshire and here was Philip Mead, a tall, solidly built left-handed batsman of the highest class. For 30 years, he excelled in the slips and was the mainstay of Hampshire’s batting, imperturbable, sound in defence, adept at taking singles, strong on the leg side and driving on either side of the wicket. Kent knew him well; during his career, including matches outside the holiday periods, he took 4,486 runs off their bowlers, with 15 hundreds and an average of 52.77. In the Championship nobody made more runs than Mead’s 46,268 or took more wickets than Freeman’s 3,151, of which 226 were in matches against Hampshire. The versatile George Brown, left-handed batsman, right-arm medium paced bowler and occasional wicket-keeper, Walter Livsey, the wicket-keeper, Alec Kennedy who bowled medium paced inswingers and leg cutters and Jack Newman, who opened with the new ball and then turned to off breaks, were other stalwarts in the Hampshire team. They were led by Lionel Tennyson, another of those colourful, charismatic characters who enriched the game in the 1920s. Grandson of the poet, Tennyson, who became the third Baron in 1928, was associated with Hampshire cricket from 1913 to 1936, captaining the side for 14 years from 1919 onwards. A hard-hitting batsman, his courage knew no bounds – there was the famous occasion when he made 63 and 36 against Gregory and McDonald with a basket guard on his injured left hand when leading England in 86