Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

Chapter Two Apprenticeship King first came before the public, to use the idiom of the day, in 1895, the year in which Leicestershire was admitted to the County Championship (although twelve of its county fixtures the previous year had been accepted as ‘first-class’). He was paid £1 15s 0d a week for twenty weeks, a wage occasionally supplemented for him by a match fee. The County Ground in 1895 was that now known as Grace Road but then as the Aylestone Ground, just off the main Lutterworth to Leicester road and about two miles south of the city centre. It was at the time not a famous ground, unlike a predecessor on Wharf Street, site in 1836 of the first ‘home’ match of the North v South and whence the triumphant Alfred Mynn was laid upon a stage-coach roof for the journey to London, so battered by Redgate’s bowling that amputation of his right leg was feared. Nonetheless, Grace Road had witnessed in 1878 the first-ever century in England by an ‘Australian’, the Woolwich-born Charles Bannerman, when Leicestershire was the first county to offer the visitors a lump sum for playing; and Leicestershire’s sensational defeat of the Australians ten years later, after which the professionals were presented with £5 each and the amateurs with engraved silver snuff-boxes. Although the ground is on slightly elevated land with a sharpish drop to the west and at the north-west corner, its drainage, until extensive work in the 1990s, was poor since it has a slight rise to the south and consists of Boulder Clay over Keuper Marl. Its pitch and outfield, moreover, were rough, a legacy of its earlier use as ploughed fields belonging to the Duke of Rutland. It was in consequence frequently not conducive to good batting, and it is hardly surprising that in the seven years of its first-class cricket before 1946 there were only two scores by home batsmen over 117. Nevertheless, Fred Root, the Derbyshire, Worcestershire and England professional, who was once on the Leicestershire staff and had gone to school only a few hundred yards away, claimed that it was ‘one of the best grounds ever made’; but his youthful memories were probably enhanced by 18