Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

quite as much as Tom Emmett would have liked with his much reiterated ‘smell ‘er’). The third shows the position just after impact, the back foot now well over the popping crease, although that foot is in this picture not as near the vertical owing to the position of the front foot between middle and off rather than well outside off stump. In the fourth photograph the bat is at its height in the follow-through, the batsman’s body completely and strikingly upright, whereas Beldam’s illustrations of other batsmen at the conclusion of this stroke all show some degree of forward inclination until the bat is almost horizontal behind the batsman’s back. The variation in position of the front foot, the heel ranging from just on the leg side of middle stump to well outside off, was determined of course by the width of the ball. Clearly he put his foot well to the line of the ball, thus leaving little gap between bat and pad and not feeding the slips with an uncontrolled prod. A further observation can be made from these photographs: King’s bottom hand is very close to the splice, indicating that he tended to use it too much in the production of, especially, attacking forward strokes. 12 King was an excellent forward-player, like so many batsmen of his era, a consequence of both his upbringing and the type of ball he most often faced, for until the outbreak of the Great War, and even for some years thereafter, bowlers, by employing a fairly full length, to a considerable extent accommodated forward play. Nevertheless, as Fry remarks, the opening years of the twentieth century, early in which King passed into his thirties, witnessed the growth of ‘skilful and scientific . . . back play’, which Fry opines is ‘even more important than forward play’ especially on turning wickets. Even earlier in his book dedicated to ‘The Queen-Empress’ Ranjitsinhji (or was it already Fry?) had emphasized, against prevailing opinion, the importance of playing back as being safer than playing forward when ‘part of the stroke is made on faith’, a quotation picked up by D.L.A.Jephson in his advice in the 1904 Wisden : ‘when in doubt play back, and keep on playing back ’ (Jephson’s italics). Herein Knight, who first played for his county in the same year as King and therefore was under the same tutelage of Tom Emmett for seven years, concurs: ‘These back-play strokes need a very watchful eye, yet there is no method of play in which 34 Technique and Style 12 This also could have been a contributory cause of the closed face in the third photograph. Perhaps when a young boy he should have been encouraged, since he was naturally left-handed, to bat the other way round so that his leading arm would have been his stronger left.