Lives in Cricket No 27 - CB Llewellyn

42 Chapter Seven Llewellyn and the Chinaman When John Arlott interviewed Buck in 1960, he learned that Llewellyn was the first bowler in English cricket to bowl ‘the chinaman’ with any degree of frequency. While normally an orthodox slow left-arm spinner, he used the left-hander’s off- break and its complementary googly, employing it quite often and with considerable accuracy on plumb wickets, where natural spin did not turn the ball. Buck’s explanation continued that he was a product of the ‘Schwarz School’. When Reggie Schwarz returned to England from South Africa in 1904, having earlier learned the trick of the googly from Bernard Bosanquet, while playing with him for Middlesex, Buck was one of Schwarz’s pupils. The others were Gordon White and Aubrey Faulkner, who both bowled right-handed. Schwarz, White and Faulkner, together with Ernest Vogler, all created a sensation when touring England with South Africa in 1907, as English batsmen found their spin very puzzling. Buck also told John Arlott that it took him two years of struggle to master the googly. Harry Altham, who appeared in first-class cricket during Buck’s time with Hampshire but never in the same match, refers to him in his standard History of Cricket, first published in 1926, as ‘the only left-hander known to bowl the “googly”.’ By the late 1960s this, and Arlott’s report, seem to have been forgotten, as C.S.Marriott’s scholarly The Complete Leg-Break Bowler, published in 1968, says that Ellis Achong first bowled the chinaman in the late 1920s and early 1930s. He adds that if anyone attempted to bowl it at all in county cricket in the twenties and thirties, it was ‘purely as a pantomime turn.’ He says that Morris Leyland took it up seriously in 1933 and 1934 and was then followed by various Australians. David Frith, in his book The Slow Men published in 1984, revives recognition of Buck’s wrist-spin skill, referring to him ‘sometimes bowling that devilish ball, the left-hander’s googly.’ There seem to be very few contemporary reports of Buck’s bowling methods and no writer of his time has suggested he was some kind of ‘mystery’ bowler. So presumably he used his left-arm wrist-spin, in either its conventional or googly forms, only sparingly. The truth of the