Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

piece with the book, thus giving the lie to doubts of the latter’s authorship (as do his columns in the Leicester Daily Mercury of 1904 53 ), and deserves to be better known. It is quoted here, in its entirety, for the extra light it sheds on its subject. Probably because he was a batsman (and splendid cover-point) Knight does, however, almost completely overlook King’s abilities as a bowler. Some Memories of J.H.King It is some thirty years ago since King and I first played together in a kind of county trial against Uppingham Rovers on the old ground at Aylestone. The lithe and slender figure of those days has thickened and the astonishing quickness in the field has passed. The great love of the game, the superb physique and stamina, the technical skill, the shrewd assiduity – these have stayed with him and contributed to a supremacy more prolonged than any hitherto known in Leicestershire cricket. It is perhaps one of the advantages of age – if it may be said to have advantages – that it looks as from some lone observatory above the mists and worries always around the present, to see the figures of the past serene and beautiful as the stars. One hears again the pavilion bell that broke up all discussion and quickened lingering feet from out the rough-timbered fastness that hid all sight of the Aylestone field. There were giants then – although many are but voiceless shadows now. What a fine bowler was Pougher; and has poor Bill Tomlin’s late cut ever been surpassed or his rich unconscious humour ? And as a wicket-keeper purely, have there been many better than Whiteside? The correctness of King’s early style, his keen watchfulness of the ball right on to the bat impressed Arnold Rylott, the genial and aged Leicester bowler, who always spoke of him as pre-eminently a batsman rather than the bowler whom others foreshadowed. In later years the watchfulness may not have been so marked, but his superb driving through the covers, the splendid freeness of his arm swing and the quick swiftness of his flashing cut had qualities belonging to the permanent and the real no less than to the transient. I vividly remember a cut 120 Albert Knight’s Appreciation 53 It cannot now be ascertained why he did not have a contract in 1905, but it may be conjectured without great risk of inviting derision that the editor or proprietor found his English to be too high-flown and at times sesquipedalian for a provincial newspaper’s readership. Further examples of his prose may be found on pages 21, 43 and 53.