Lives in Cricket No 39 - Alec Watson

5 Introduction Alec Watson has long been recognised in Scotland as one of the few cricketers who left that country to seek fame and fortune as a professional cricketer in England; other notable instances since then have been Alec Kennedy and Mike Denness. Professional cricketers were not unknown in Scotland from the mid-1840s, when Watson was born. Charles Lawrence, better known for his later achievements in Australia, began his career at Perth (Scotland) in the 1840s, and he was followed by others. However, these were generally from England; the traffic in the opposite direction was very small or non-existent before Watson went south, after a couple of years as a professional in Scotland. While professional sport was not unknown in Scotland before then, professional sportsmen had largely been confined to golfers, who earned their money by teaching the game, selling or repairing clubs, looking after the courses and taking part in competitions. Professional cricketers were of course also expected to coach players, look after the grounds and play the game for reward. It was a time when people were beginning to be willing to pay to watch top-class sport and its practitioners, although the real explosion in participating and watching did not take place in Scotland until towards the end of the nineteenth century, as working people began to have more time and disposable income to watch and take part in sport. In his early career Watson seems to have been noted mainly as a batsman, and potentially a wicket-keeper, with his fastish round-arm bowling only as a sideline. However, a chance meeting in 1868 with the amateur spin bowler David Buchanan led to him gaining expertise in ‘break-back’, that is, off-spin-bowling; though, when he went to England, it was still mainly as a batsman. There, however, it was his bowling that eventually brought him remarkable success, and he was often among the top bowlers in the country. Yet he appeared but little in representative cricket. To some extent his opportunities may have been limited, but the usual reason given for his failure to break permanently into the higher echelons of the game is that his bowling action was suspect; in other words, was he a chucker?