Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

‘hopeless – I never saw father knock a nail in: he couldn’t do a thing’, in curious contrast with his interest and competence in the garden. Since he wished, nevertheless, for independence and would not stay beholden to daughter and son-in-law in houses that they had built in Scraptoft or Rothley, he lived on his own at 38 Brinsmead Road in Leicester and, by 1940, at 107 Lothair Road, but eventually, suffering from diabetes, he went to stay with his daughter, by that time a widow, in Denbigh, North Wales. He died in that town, at The Abbey House Nursing Home, on 18 November 1946, seven months after his close friend Knight, and was buried in the graveyard of Lutterworth parish church, to be joined there later by his brother and, in 2004, by his daughter’s ashes. At his funeral the Psalm was No.53, ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God’, and the hymns were ‘Abide with me’ and ‘Lead, kindly light’, while Handel’s ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth’ from ‘Messiah’ and Spohr’s ‘O rest in the Lord’ were played on the organ. His memory was perpetuated in his home town by the naming in about 1950 of a short street, King’s Way, joining Woodway Road and Elmhirst Road and continued by Whittle Road, which perpetuates the memory of another famous figure intimately connected with the town. And it is kept vivid in his family by his grand-daughter and great-grandson Timothy, who once as a little boy sent his grandmother a birthday card consisting entirely of King’s cricketing statistics. His family clearly had sporting genes: besides his brother James, his nephew John William, after playing 40 matches for Worcestershire in 1927 and 1928, appeared in eight for his native county in 1929 to become the third member of the family to represent Leicestershire. His grandson, Christopher Wearn, chose another of King’s sports, helping his school, Uppingham, win the Michael Farriday Trophy in Canada, shooting for the Combined Cadet Force and internationally for Wales and reaching the shoot-off for a place in the team for the Commonwealth Games. The best-known sportsman in the family after King himself is, however, great-grandson Timothy Cockroft, son of Margaret’s daughter Judy (with sporting, hand-eye co-ordination genes inherited also from his father Richard who played for Devon Dumplings). Timothy was in the first eleven at Wellington College, played for Berkshire Under-19s, was a member of the Old Wellingtonian team that won The Cricketer Cup in 1996 and now 116 Retirement