Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

As a batsman King did his duty by his county, which moved up the table to eleventh, even though the target of 1,000 runs eluded him, perhaps owing to his missing three matches, two at the end of the season resulting from a finger being split by Maurice Tate. His average was a paltry 22.20 in Championship matches, but only two regular players were above him, and then only at 27.57 and 22.97, in a very low-scoring year. 41 His highest innings was 92, achieved twice, and both times as the highest score in the match on either side. The first came at Leicester, when rain prevented a deserved and easy victory against Nottinghamshire, and, in addition to ‘defence like a book’, he ‘revealed much of his old power, with flashing hits on the off-side, and certainty in his strokes to leg’. The second was in Geary’s benefit match against Warwickshire, which the beneficiary emphatically ended to give his side an innings victory. King had another good match with 54 and 43* at Leyton and scored a crucial 47 in the victory by a single run over Gloucestershire, while his 10 at Tunbridge Wells was the only score in double figures amid a quite woeful display by his team-mates. King opened what was to be the last chapter of his playing career with a century at Hove on 2 May 1925, one of only five scored for the county in the whole summer. He thus emulated the feat performed by his erstwhile colleague Sam Coe who also had made the first-class season’s opening century, in 1914. It was a fine performance, for the ‘pitch [was] on the soft side owing to recent rains’ and ‘the ball wanted close watching, as the fielding was smart’. Newspapers and The Cricketer made much of the fact that this innings was scored by the oldest man still engaged in first-class cricket, and to this day no other cricketer of this age has played regularly in the Championship apart from W.G.Quaife. 42 An old friend – the signature is B.White – from his days at Birkenhead Park enclosed a cutting from the Liverpool Echo celebrating the feat ‘against such trundlers as the mighty Gilligan and Tate’ in a letter expressing his own wildly optimistic hope that it heralded ‘still better things’. Although Wisden records that he made 114 of 108 Nestor 41 In the Championship overall, runs were scored in this season at 21.00 per wicket; Leicestershire scored its runs at 16.06 per wicket. 42 The diminutive Quaife played regularly for Warwickshire in 1927 at the age of 55. More than twenty other cricketers have played individual matches in the British Isles at an older age. King’s age on the last day of his last match was 54 years and 114 days. For Leicestershire only C.E.de Trafford, who played a single match after a long gap at 56 years and 24 days, has played at a more advanced age.