Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

did privately to his daughter, who remembered him, for instance, criticizing the decision to give a trial in the first team to the son of Aubrey Temple Sharp, that gifted batsman who sadly for the county chose the professional life of a solicitor rather than that of a cricketer: J.A.T.Sharp, he prognosticated, will ‘never play cricket as long as he lives’. 49 King’s last active involvement with cricket came during the Second World War, at which time he appears as an umpire in scorecards of more than twenty of his native county’s matches. As for his domestic life in retirement, he was very content until his wife died. ‘Father led exactly the life he wanted to; and it was wonderful really, wasn’t it? He smoked a pipe and drank little’, was the observation to me of his daughter, whose wedding photograph of him with her, on 20 September 1932 at the same church in which he himself had been married, shows him in splendid form. At that time they were still living at Rutland House, but Florence’s death at the early age of 53 around 1930 50 left him bereft: ‘He was at a loss around the house’ apart, presumably, from cooking, being Retirement 115 King with daughter Margaret on her wedding day in 1932. King with his grand-daughter, Carol, probably in 1940. 49 General Sir John Sharp, MC did have other talents, which he exercised on behalf of his country until he died suddenly at the age of 59, in Norway in January, 1977, a death, as all Leicestershire cricket believed, from poison administered by an Eastern bloc agent. 50 I cannot ascertain the exact date.