Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

for six – not run out – on the present County Ground from a Surrey bowler. The wickets were pitched rather near to the tea pavilion side, and the cut landed on the white rail – the only over-the-boundary cut I ever remember to have seen. Most habitués of the Leicester ground must think of King as stationed in the slips, where his telescopic arms and sure fingers do not let much escape him. In these early days he was as dashing and brilliant a fieldsman, as quick a racer to the boundary as one has seen. Round about the middle nineties, at Sheffield, v Yorkshire, King gave a display of fielding which he never repeated. I cannot think it was ever surpassed even by Tom Jayes, the most superb and active fieldsman who ever wore the Leicester colours. King, in this game, was at cover-point, and he stopped the ball with his head, hands, feet, and every part of his anatomy. The ball could not pass him. Yorkshire then, as nearly always, were a great fielding side, and the Sheffield crowd is very critical. King did not come in to bat until No.10 or No.11, but he then received an ovation, in appreciation of his work in the field, which many subsequent triumphs of his, both with bat and ball, cannot but recall. One incident in this particular game illustrates the shrewd imperturbability so characteristic. The ball was hit down the long slope to the Press-box, Jack after it. As he reached it, one doubted whether it would roll to the cinder boundary or not. The Yorkshiremen had already run four or five for the stroke. With extended arms, like a maid about to dive and half afraid to do so, King watched the expiring trickle of the ball. Whether it did touch the track for four or was ultimately returned when six had been run, I forget now. Mr Hillyard, the tennis player, was the bowler, a gentleman apt to get irritated when punished, and he could not understand the wisdom of King’s hesitancy. His comment, like that of Bret Hart[e]’s Californian, was “frequent and painful and free”. Rather curiously, when one thinks of that other fine veteran whom Time in its “race of hours” seems not to have wearied, Sam Coe, the memory of his early fielding predominates. As a colt – how well the forgotten term illustrates the frisky, fractious, indiarubber-ball sort of youth Sam was – he was extraordinarily quick in picking up and returning the ball. Dr Grace, in his later years, professed to believe that King and I were always arguing at the wicket over the validity of runs Albert Knight’s Appreciation 121