Lives in Cricket No 39 - Alec Watson

6 Let us now turn to the player’s life and career, with the background and possible justification for such an accusation against this very interesting cricketer. The problem is illuminated largely through two quotations. The first comes from D.D. Bone’s book Fifty Years’ Reminiscences of Scottish Cricket (1898): ‘Then there was little Alexander Watson, one of the finest bowlers that ever lifted a ball for Lancashire .... Talking to an Englishman the other day about Scottish cricket and cricketers he only laughed me to scorn.’ After mentioning a number of noted Scottish cricketers, such as Leslie Balfour Melville, Gregor MacGregor and the Steels, Bone goes on, ‘Are you also aware, sir, that about the best bowler ever England had was a Scotchman – Alec. Watson – who had only the residential qualification to play for Lancashire?’ Bone’s near contemporary John Thompson hailed Watson as ‘the champion bowler of England’. We shall examine Watson’s successful career in England in due course, but we must now consider another quotation about this player who might have seemed destined to play a large part in representative cricket. It comes from Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 1921, where in his obituary on Watson ‘S.H.P.’ (Sydney Pardon, the long-time editor of the Almanack) noted Watson’s death in the previous year, commenting on Watson being really only a county cricketer. For, while he bowled for the Players at Lord’s in 1877, he played in little representative cricket and he never went to Australia. Pardon then touched on a ‘delicate’ topic; for, while Watson was one of the ‘most successful slow bowlers of his generation, .... there is no hiding the fact that all through his career the fairness of his delivery was freely questioned.’ Wisden, of course, has much more to say on Watson, as we shall note later, but the above provides what is probably a main theme for this biography. Watson was a bowler of undoubted ability and success, success which would normally have gained him a place in representative teams in England. Yet that success was apparently tainted by a suspicion among his contemporaries about the fairness of his bowling action with regard to the laws of cricket as then framed; and that at a time when much criticism on unfair bowling was beginning to manifest itself, but when official action on it appears to have been absent. Introduction