Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

classes. His daughter remarked that he ‘had the open sesame for invitations by wealthy amateurs such as Lord and Lady Swaythling on whose yacht he used to sail out of Southampton’. 47 In part because of this he had been chosen to officiate in two of the four great social cricketing occasions of the year at Lord’s: not the Test or the Gentlemen v Players match but three ‘Varsity matches (1928-1930) and four Eton v Harrow matches (1927-1930), usually with the ex-Derbyshire all-rounder Arthur Morton. His demeanour and appearance on such occasions may have reminded some elderly followers of his county of Frankfort Moore’s humorous description of umpires in the Leicester Daily Mercury of 26 May 1900, that ‘in their long linen overalls [they] were the honorary chaplains to the MCC wearing their surplices’. 48 Fittingly King’s very last match as a first-class umpire was on 14, 15 and 16 June 1936, when he had the satisfaction of seeing Les Berry, his young colleague during his last two years as a cricketer for Leicestershire, score a century in the drawn game against Oxford University at The Parks. He must still have umpired on occasion in minor matches after that date, since Philip Snow insists that it was in either 1937 or 1938 that he invited him to dine at Christ’s when King was umpiring a match at Cambridge. At some point during this period of his life he was also employed to coach the son of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth; but he never lost his interest in or involvement with Leicestershire. From time to time he coached, watched when he could and gave advice and judgements when asked. In the last he was honest but tactful, never, for instance, speaking at Aylestone Road as bluntly as he 114 Retirement 47 His circle of friends and acquaintances was very broad and included members of the upper mercantile class such as Victor Pochin of the family that ran the large hardware business in Leicester. He also, his daughter told me, ‘got on very well’ with that shrewd, tenacious, principled, and often misunderstood, Wykehamist and Oxonian Douglas Jardine, a man brought up by a family of lawyers in the tenets of the British Raj. 48 If he had lived long enough to hear or read it, he would have had mingled approval and disapprobation of the poem on umpires by his former county colleague and later fellow umpire Alec Skelding, which began Portrayed by most cartoonists as a ‘Snoozer’, With red proboscis claiming him a ‘Boozer’, And a mien most dejected, As if spinally affected, Whom the tossed coin makes an everlasting loser. Six hours a day – if there’s actual play, He stands as in thought, clad in white array; Confident, though in purgatory, Prepared for all emergency, A martyr to the game – but for his pay ! The whole poem of 141 lines was originally entitled ‘Duties, Trials and Troubles of County Umpires’, but Skelding later adopted Brian Sellers’ suggestion of ‘The Umpire’s Lament’. It may be found in the Leicetershire County Cricket Club Yearbook for 1960, pp 73-75.