Famous Cricketers No 72 - Lord Cowdrey of Tonbridge, C.B.E.

1971, 15 years, a period equalled only by the founding father of modern Kent cricket, Lord Harris. Indeed aged just 20 he captained Kent in a county match in 1953, the youngest-ever player so to do, matching his status as a cricketing prodigy of having received his county cap two years earlier, aged 18. Only the aforementioned Lord Harris can match Cowdrey’s service to Kent and country as a player and administrator. In terms of records, Cowdrey stands sixth in the all time list of Kent run scorers, his career average is actually beaten by only Les Ames of those who scored over 10,000 runs for the county. He is fourth in the list of Kent century-makers. These figures need to be set against the fact for the best part of half of his career Cowdrey played in a Kent side that was at best indifferent, at worst weak. It was also largely a period of uncovered wickets and there were in the 1950s and 1960s a succession of very wet summers which did nothing to help prolific scoring. Also it was a career too often interrupted by injury and illness. For all the questions over his captaincy of England, the same doubts were never so pre-eminent in Kent. For this his shrewd personal appointment of Les Ames as the Kent manager has much to answer. Ames provided the perfect match to the often diffident Cowdrey, not the least in the firm control of discipline off the field, never Cowdrey’s greatest strength. Together they raised Kent from the depths they found in 1957. It took 13 years, not something impatient county committees would tolerate now, but in the remarkable summer of 1970 they brought back the County Championship to the hop county for the first time since 1913. It was a steady rise up the table in the 1960s as a number of notably talented cricketers emerged to the county ranks paralleled by some very wise overseas recruitments. Having won the Championship, Cowdrey gave up the captaincy the following year. But there was still a Cowdrey career after 1971, although the Kent selection committee were too often in some doubt what to do with him. He slipped down the batting order and sometimes was inexplicably dropped altogether, the argument being to make way for younger players. Nevertheless he played a number of notable innings in these later years – not the least his hundredth hundred and an awe-inspiring innings to beat the Australians. He still had a place in the age of the limited-overs game, which would not on first sight seem his natural milieu. This particularly applied to its longer format. Remarkably his five Man of the Match awards in the Gillette Cup still stood as the Kent record for the knock-out competition a quarter of century later. In the Benson and Hedges Cup Cowdrey made the first century by anyone in the competition and he also made one telling late-order contribution to a Kent final win. The shorter Sunday League found him, not surprisingly, at his least successful but he was still capable of a half century at a good time. England Cowdrey played Test cricket for England over a period of 20 years. When he retired he had scored more runs and more hundreds than any other Englishman, and played in more tests and taken more catches than anyone anywhere. He was the first player to play in a hundred tests, a distinction he celebrated with a hundred. But it was an England career of serious highs and lows, of a potential that was perhaps never fully fulfilled, of issues such as the captaincy and his role as an opener that too often seriously distracted, and of no small measure of bad luck. Cowdrey was an unexpected choice for the 1954/55 Ashes tour. His capabilities were known but 1954 had not been a great season. He had a strong champion in Len Hutton who had witnessed at first hand his pedigree in two memorable innings at Scarborough Festivals. It was Hutton who guided Cowdrey through that memorable first tour, not the least when Cowdrey senior died prematurely very early on. Cowdrey’s remarkable maiden test century at Melbourne against Lindwall and Miller in a time of England crisis arguably turned the series for Tyson to complete. It was a test innings he possibly never 7