Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

Chapter Twelve Albert Knight’s Appreciation Albert Edward Knight, King’s long-time colleague and close friend, was not only a Test player, but also author of the only book on cricket that C.B.Fry is reputed to have envied. It was commonly believed, however, that its style and command of English were beyond the compass of a mere professional sportsman. The tone is set by the opening sentence: ‘Antecedent to the beginning of the eighteenth century, cricket history is, in the main, a record of conjecture, the sifting of inferences previously hazarded, the weighing of evidences largely hypothetical’. Critics, contemporary and recent (even so distinguished a cricket writer as J.M.Kilburn) seem to have ignored, or been unaware of, the fact that Knight had attended the Wyggeston School in Leicester (to-day eviscerated and magniloquently styled Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I Sixth-Form College). Here he had learned Latin, ever a fine training for mastery of English grammar and vocabulary, and had become sufficiently enamoured of it to make classical allusions during a match. 51 He was, moreover, a Methodist lay preacher. 52 The appreciation of King that he wrote for his friend’s benefit brochure in 1923 is stylistically of a 119 Albert Knight was one of King’s Leicestershire colleagues for seventeen seasons. 51 He was in general a cultured man, well-versed in English (and some foreign) literature and knowledgeable in music, who used to attend lectures at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Leicester (‘People who don’t attend them say they are abominably “dry”; people who do presumably differ’). The fact, however, that he was once employed in the lowly trade of ‘shoe clicker’ suggests that he had had to leave school at a comparatively early age and was in consequence to a considerable extent self-taught. 52 His piety was even more evident than his devotion to the Classics. It is famously told of him that once on holding a steepling hit in the outfield he sank to his knee (some accounts less probably record knees). Upon enquiry over his well-being by his captain, he replied that he ‘was thanking’ his ‘Maker’.