Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

a figure familiar to me came from the towpath asking if he could join us. I was only too glad to banish my friend to retrieving shots from J.H.King and myself. Taking off his blue serge jacket, King bowled with as high an action as I was ever to see. At a slow pace he made the ball jump, skid and fall on the plantains to rap my padless legs amid his apologies. In his turn he stroked the ball to the off and away from his legs with ease. After about an hour we accompanied King across the canal to leave him at his house in Aylestone Road near its junction with Duncan Road, which leads to the Grace Road ground. The house is still there, and Sylvia Michael, the outstanding county Honorary Archivist living on Park Hill Avenue, 1 remembers crossing Aylestone Road as a child to fetch sweets being sold there in the War. When Winterton and I left King at his gate, there was a complaint about feeling weary, which I silenced with: ‘It isn’t every day that you field to an England player.’ Looking back now, that was a shade dismissive, I feel, and I hope that I did not put him off cricket for life. In my final year at Christ’s College, Cambridge, I noticed that King was to umpire a match at Fenner’s, and I wrote to invite him to lunch with me in Hall. In my four years there I never saw anyone other than of undergraduate age and from other colleges eat there (apart from on High Table), but I had few misgivings when he accepted, as his demeanour was always inflexibly gentlemanly. Meeting him at the College gate, I took him to the rooms of my brother, C.P.Snow, who was a Fellow and Tutor and would eat at High Table. King was delighted when Charles told him that he had often seen him in his playing days on the Aylestone Road ground, recalling in particular when he was sixteen the devastation of McDonald and Gregory there. Who could forget it? I was not sure how undergraduate conversation would flow in Hall with someone so much older. I had invited Norman Yardley, captain of the University, successful with Yorkshire and noted by my brother in his regular column in the late 1930s in The Cricketer under the pseudonym ‘XX’ as potentially a captain of England, to join us from his college. As President of the Hawks’ Club for a select few Blues, near or Half Blues in all games, Yardley had piloted my election to it. I was captain of the Christ’s team and saw to it that half of the side sat near King, who told me how pleased he was to have just learned from Yardley that I had been captain of the Leicestershire Second Eleven for three years in the long vacations. 8 Foreword 1 Sadly Sylvia Michael died shortly before this book went to press.