Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

his prowess as he topped the county averages the following year with 80 wickets at only 17.03; and, again unlike Astill, King did not preserve his boyish looks. In the Edwardian age, as he at last began to fulfill his potential, prove his worth as an all-rounder and perform so valorously on so many occasions, King came to be at first respected and then increasingly admired. His batting did not excite in quite the same way as did that of ‘Noisy’ de Trafford or ‘Very Fast Scoring’ Crawford with flamboyant sixes, and, despite often being forceful and free-flowing, it was too correct to encourage spectators to chuckle at mishaps so like their own as did the more rustic strokeplay of Sammy Coe; 58 but, like that of the obdurate warrior ‘Cis’ Wood, it called forth a wonderment, perhaps even a reverence, and from the time of his two centuries for the Players, when he was lauded on the national stage, supporters took pride in ‘our Jack’. His bowling similarly did not excite with the high-speed scatter of stumps like that of Woodcock or Skelding or with the extravagant spin like that later of Jack Walsh 59 which resulted in spectators’ hilarity at the discomfiture of bemused batsman and a perplexed wicket-keeper who found that he was, as it were, ‘picking a tablet of soap out of the bath’; 60 but, again, King was respected and esteemed. After the Great War older spectators, their active days behind them, admired his achievements of which they were so little capable themselves, and their younger brethren were in awe at what ‘an old man’ could achieve. They may sometimes have chuckled at his rheumatical scampering to make his ground, but it was a chuckle entirely without malice as at a favourite ‘grandpa’. Now at last we can say that supporters felt love for King, but it was a love not to be displayed in any effusive manner – he was too dignified a man for that. His Place in Leicestershire’s Annals 127 58 As Neville Cardus wrote, ‘See an innings by Coe . . . and you ought not to be long in guessing from the smack of rotund nature about it that he has passed the main portion of his days in the sun on a field with rustic benches running intimately round’. 59 Jack Fingleton remembered even Bradman playing ‘for an off-break and miss[ing] the ball by a good two feet as it spun the other way . . . I had never before seen Bradman so completely beaten’. But Bradman merely commented (in a private letter) that Walsh, although he ‘bowled a really good “wrong-un”’ . . . ‘got a lot of stick for little reward’ in that match and ‘like all spinners . . . tended to be erratic and had difficulty in controlling length and direction’. 60 Ray Julian in a private letter.