Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

he bowled only twenty overs, this figure was 41.66. Herein he had doubtless benefited from Tom Emmett’s badinage in the nets when, as Root recalls, he would chide errant bowlers with such words as ‘yo couldn’ bowl a houp, and until yo’ can yo’ll get noa time for thy bread and cheese and ‘arf a pint, not if thou ‘as to stop here all neeight’, and the threat to bring his ‘two lasses’ from ‘whome’ to show them up. Emmett will certainly have emphasized length, and perhaps line also, to make up for his reputation as one who used to unsettle a batsman by bowling a wide immediately before the wicket-taking ball. 21 Another beneficial influence on King was, to quote Knight’s words in the Leicester Daily Mercury , ‘old Rylott, that superbly great bowler, grizzled like a prophet, but with more of a prophet’s fire and fierceness, for his voice and his mien were those of a gentle woman’, who retained his ‘interest in bowling as a poet in his love’, and passed on his knowledge of left-arm bowling both at Leicester and as chief of the ground staff at Lord’s. There are no photographs of King bowling in a match and I have found no comments on his field-placing, apart from the remark in a South African newspaper that, antecedent to his very first over in South Africa, he exercised ‘the greatest care’ in arranging his fielders. One must assume that for the right-hander he had very much a leg-side field with always a leg-slip and a fine leg, but a slip for the ball that he straightened, 22 and packed the mid-wicket, mid-on and mid-off regions. For the left-hander he will always have had at least one slip and packed his off-side field. He probably made no use of a very close fielder in front of the wicket except when the pitch was fiery or crumbled, since the ballooning bad-pad catches off modern, springy, light-weight pads were not created by the various types of his period. In the days when wicket-keepers would have been ashamed, or worse, to be described as glorified long-stops, King will have had his always standing up to the wickets: indeed his first county keeper, Johnny Whiteside, stood up even to their colleague Arthur Woodcock who, at least in his initial overs, did not bow the knee to even the terrifying Kortright. This practice, of course, augmented his number of victims stumped. By nature he was a combative bowler, Technique and Style 43 21 He once bowled 55 wides in a season, though claiming never to bowl one deliberately. 22 Did he ever on a good wicket dispense with this? Convention would have disapproved.