Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

lifeless wicket drying under the influence of a strong breeze’ and only Hallows and Ernest Tyldesley in one innings each were able to puzzle him out. Although in the home match against Somerset, the first ever between the two counties, he had no wicket in the second innings, when the opposition was set only 138 to win, his parsimonious concession of only six runs off his first 12 overs (and ultimately 17 off 30) was a major contribution to his side’s victory by 47 runs, as it allowed Astill to bowl with the necessary aggression to take wickets. In the return match at Weston-super-Mare, King performed the hat-trick for the second time in his career. Four of his seven wickets for 34 runs, including the ‘hat-trick’ ball, were to catches by Astill, who took the other three wickets in bringing about the same victorious result as in the home match two months earlier. At Derby the same two bowlers concluded their opponents’ home season by dismissing them for 53 (King four for 25). When as September dawned and Leicestershire reached Southampton King need another four wickets for his century, but Hampshire put on 183 for the first wicket and he had none of the first three. The armed forces then gave him a boost as he ensnared both a major (the Hon Lionel Tennyson) and a commander (Gerald Harrison) before he clean bowled another amateur, the Cambridge Blue Harold McDonell. But the hardened professionals C.P.Mead and J.A.Newman then engaged in a long stand. When this was broken by King’s partner his heart must have sunk, but, though the score was past 400, Tennyson ‘chivalrously’ did not declare and soon thereafter King Nestor 99 King’s second hat-trick, off Somerset at Weston-super-Mare in 1920, was followed by a defiant six from ‘Crusoe’ Robertson-Glasgow.