Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

plays for the Hurlingham club, for which he regularly averages approximately 50 runs an innings. He was also in his school’s and Berkshire’s Under-19 hockey teams and was captain of the former’s squash first five; but it is in rackets that he has really made his name. A member of his school’s rackets first pair, he later joined with Toby Sawrey-Cookson to win the Noel Bruce Cup in 1998/99 for the only time in the Old Wellingtonians’ history. Together with Mark Hue-Williams he won the national Under-24 Doubles for the four years from 1988 to 1991 and the individual title also in 1991. No fewer than seven times, with four different partners, he has won the Amateur Doubles Championship (1992, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2003, 2005 and 2008), while in 1994, 1995 and 1996 with Willie Boone he won the Open Doubles Championship. He has also three times been in the winning pair in the United States Open Doubles and won both the singles and doubles in the Canadian Amateur Championships of 1997 and 1999. Twice also he has challenged unsuccessfully for the World Doubles Championship, in 1996 with Willie Boone and in 2005 with Guy Smith-Bingham. His sister Georgina, a quondam off-break bowler in the nets at home with her father and brother, was captain of Retirement 117 Timothy Cockroft, King’s great-grandson, is one of the world’s leading amateur rackets players.