Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

eschewed. Newspapers also advert, again as early as 1901, to King’s leg-glances, which seem to have been, as with most batsmen including Ranjitsinhji, more forcing strokes to leg than mere angled glides. As King aged he became more of a back-foot and leg-side player. In comparing his controlled classicism with the boisterous rusticity of his slightly younger contemporary and fellow left-hander Sam Coe, Wisden writes of their batting in 1914: ‘Coe, the more powerful in his methods, excelled in the off-drive which sent the ball with great force along the ground, the square cut and the lusty on-drive. King, fond of waiting for the ball, cut late, pulled, and used the leg glance in his more up-to-date style’. Even later, in the appreciation of King on the front page of the issue of The Cricketer for 16 July in its inaugural year of 1921, the writer (surely Pelham Warner) remarks that while ‘he has all the left-hander’s strokes on the off-side, [he] is particularly effective in persuading balls away to leg’. Notwithstanding, he never lost in any way his love for the drive. An old Leicestershire habitué and erstwhile committee member once told me that in the 1930s he had seen a gentleman in a blue serge suit spanking the bowling on the practice pitch with clean, crisp drives. This was King, then a venerable sixty-odd years old. He seems, therefore, to have had the full repertoire of orthodox attacking strokes at his command; and in this he was aided by use of a bat perhaps a little on the heavy side even for his strong and muscular frame: that from 1904 now in the possession of his grand-daughter weighs, in its present completely dried state, 2lb 6¾oz. His friend Albert Knight preferred a slightly lighter implement and terms the 2lb 10oz weapon of the ‘mere hitter’ Albert Trott, as ‘a savage beast of a thing’, approving of ‘gentler souls who can tap more effectively with a bat of 2lb 2oz.’ What indeed would they have said of the railway-sleeper with which Graham Gooch scored a triple century against India in 1990 or, from a quite different period, William Ward’s four-pound monster? Despite his fondness for aggressive stroke-play King was certainly a thinking batsman, with not only the technical ability but also the patience to defend, sometimes for many hours, when the situation demanded, as it often did, for during most of his career Leicestershire had but a weak team and never seriously challenged for the Championship. His friend Knight described him in the local newspaper in 1904 as ‘one of the most dogged and imperturbable Technique and Style 36