Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

reliability, honesty and sage discernment than a flamboyantly self-advertising cigar and a self-consciously sophisticated, nervously excited or incogitantly proletarian cigarette. And he drank with great moderation: ‘he did not think much’ of his team-mates William Benskin and Arthur Mounteney, whom at home he deprecatingly styled ‘beer-swillers’, as his daughter observed. Moreover, he was loyal to his family, his friends and his county. Indeed, in a manner reminiscent of Hambledon’s members sporting buttons engraved with the letters ‘CC’, he even had his own waistcoat buttons especially made with a miniature fox’s mask in each to show his devotion to the hunting county whose cricket team still vaunts its vulpine emblem. When he told a reporter from the Leicester Mercury in 1923 that he had ‘always enjoyed his cricket in his long connection with Leicestershire’ it was no platitudinous parochial patriotism. Having shown what he could do with the ball at the age of 49, King now showed, though suffering periodically from rheumatism, what he could do with the bat at 50, demonstrating ‘the skill and power’ and the ‘plent[iful] variety’ of scoring strokes of old in obtaining three centuries and six fifties in his nearly fifteen hundred runs. His 1,000 was reached on 2 July, only just over halfway through the season. He still bowled sufficiently to take 55 wickets at an average two below his batting, but this was the last year in which he could be classed as an all-rounder. It was Astill’s great bowling year: he established a new county record of 152 Championship wickets and became the first Leicestershire cricketer to emulate King by achieving the ‘double’. Since he had good support from Benskin and Bill Shipman’s younger brother Alan, King was not needed so much, and indeed did not bowl at all in some matches in mid-season. Wisden considers Astill, King and the amateur Aubrey Sharp, who appeared in less than half the games, as the stars in a season which saw Leicestershire moving up to eleventh place and winning a record ten matches. In one issue of this, its inaugural year, The Cricketer chose to honour King with its Nestor 101 One of King’s vulpine waistcoat buttons.