Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

Beldam, 17 showing him wearing a cap. This was not uncommon for the period, and as fast a bowler as King’s younger colleague George Geary was always thus attired even when in full flow. The photographs of his action may be supplemented by verbal reports which speak of it in terms such as ‘beautifully easy’. Contemporary reports sometimes call him a slow or slow-medium bowler, but in Beldam’s and Fry’s magisterial tome he is classified as a ‘medium pace bowler’ alongside, amongst others, Alec Hearne, Schofield Haigh, J.N.Crawford, Walter Mead, Arthur Hallam and Hugh Trumble, and thus faster than his fellow left-armers Wilfred Rhodes, Colin Blythe and James Hallows who are all categorized therein as ‘slow medium’. These terms should probably not be taken as meaning quite the same then as to-day in an era of quickened ‘slow’ bowlers. Fry comments on his lack of a follow-through, which suggests no excessive pace. The first photograph, showing him in an extraordinarily upright posture some two or three strides from delivery and just before the transference of the ball from right to left hand, suggests that many antecedent steps would have been supererogatory – in old age he was described as taking a ‘three-pace shuffle’. Nonetheless, he did enjoy opening the bowling and having the use of a hard ball, which, on a hard wicket and allied with his height and the fact that he kept his left arm high in delivery (even, as Philip Snow recalls, in old age) could give him uncomfortable lift, 18 although Fry, in speaking of spin on a sticky wicket, somewhat surprisingly claims that despite his high arm ‘the ball after leaving his hand behaves very much as though delivered by a round-arm bowler of the old-fashioned kind’. Like many slowish bowlers, he did have a faster delivery. Fry claims that his ‘best point’ was ‘the skilful way in which he leads up to’ this. It was achieved ‘with his arm a little lower than usual . . . Technique and Style 39 17 There are three other still extant photographs of King bowling, but these are all ‘posed’ and offer us little help. One photograph has him against an odd ‘gardenly’ background; another appeared in The Cricketer in 1921; the third in his 1923 benefit brochure. 18 Before the Second World War a slow bowler frequently opened an innings, and the combination of a fast and a slow bowler often had the advantage of unsettling the batsmen since they were not permitted to become accustomed to a single pace. In favourable conditions even the very slow bowler ‘Tich’ Freeman used to open the bowling for Kent. One of the most famous examples of this combination starting an innings occurred in the First Test of the 1909 series against Australia when Hirst and Blythe, in taking all 20 wickets between them (11 by Blythe) on a sodden pitch at Edgbaston, were primarily responsible for England’s comfortable victory. Even opening with two slow bowlers was not uncommon; and we shall see that King and Astill often opened the bowling together for their native county.