Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

figures of 17 wickets for 111 runs. His best return was seven for 91 against the champions Yorkshire, who made 302 at Huddersfield, immediately after his five for 46 had helped dismiss Nottinghamshire for 259 at home. Another notable performance was his taking of the last four Essex wickets at a personal cost of nine runs, again at Leicester, where he was unlucky to miss a hat-trick as the last man, Harry Young, ‘put the ball up in dangerous proximity to Stocks at square leg’. He managed to show himself the all-rounder with a fifty and a five-wicket haul on two occasions, both away, against Worcestershire and when he and Geeson bowled unchanged in bottom county Hampshire’s second innings. He also took four wickets in a match against Cambridge University, in which, for an MCC team captained by Grace, Leicestershire bowlers had a combined tally of 19 dismissals. King began the season batting at No.7, but after scoring two fifties at The Oval he was promoted, generally to No.3. Having in his first four seasons scored only four fifties he now scored six, although only one was at home. His highest innings was 121 at Derby, excoriated by Wisden in carrying ‘caution to excess’ for taking three hours and fifty minutes but, as Lord Mancroft later observed, the English invented cricket since, ‘not being a spiritual people’, they needed something ‘to give themselves’ a ‘concept of eternity’ – and it was King’s maiden century, made after ‘a nasty smack on the finger’, and not really very slow anyway. The first year of the new century enhanced the reputation of the English climate for ‘chameleon-like changes’, although for the Leicestershire club it was more notable in that a move was made to a site only about a mile from the centre of the city, in the belief that greater crowds could be expected there than at the Grace Road ground which was accessible for most non-pedestrian spectators only by horse-tram. The club was right since in 1901 there were 1,500 members, as opposed to only 600 in 1897, and the following year a further 400. The creation of the new ground, nearer to the river, and of alluvium this time over the Keuper Marl, involved the levelling of a small part of the ancient earthworks, possibly part of a Roman aqueduct system, known as Raw Dykes. Prince Rupert had come this way to array his army here in 1645 for the successful siege of Leicester at which, according to local tradition, the death of the sentinel who had replaced him had brought about John Bunyan’s conversion. Now the water-meadows were transformed into a pleasing ground, marred only by the gasworks From Journeyman to Master 47