Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

50 only six times in 49 innings, and he again took only 33 Championship wickets, his average for the former discipline being now far lower than for the latter. Maybe his exertions in South Africa were taking their toll. His best return was four for 23 to conclude victory over Worcestershire. In batting he made 126* at Glossop against the bottom-place club, and 118 in an eventually successful attempt to save the last home match of the season, against Warwickshire, but there is something worrying about being stumped in such a situation. Going in at No.3 against Essex he carried his bat unavailingly for 54, but the fact that he scored only about a quarter of the runs while he was at the wicket suggests an innings of great determination (an inheritance from Robert the Bruce?) rather than fluency and confidence. There was one curious incident in the match at The Oval: ‘King played a ball down against his stumps, chopped it out, moved a yard forward, and more in fun than anything else, called Knight’ for a run. Upon a half-hearted appeal from Tom Hayward and after a full minute’s consultation between the umpires W.A.J.West and A.Millward, he was given out ‘hit the ball twice’, the eighth time in the history of first-class cricket that a batsman had been thus dismissed. There was no further instance for just over fifty years, although it later became quite popular in the 1980s in the sub-continent; it is still the most recent instance in England. It is perhaps fitting that this ‘distinction’ should go to a Leicestershire player, since it was in a match between players of Leicester and Coventry in 1788 that there arose about this very issue a dispute which was ‘submitted to the first reputed cricket society in the Kingdom’, 27 the earliest recorded instance of MCC being asked to adjudicate over a legal matter. King’s dismissal was, however, moot and the subject of much controversy since Law 27 at the time stated simply: ‘The striker is out . . . if the ball be struck, or be stopped by any part of his person, and he willfully strike it again, except that it be done for the purpose of guarding his wicket, which he may do with his bat, or any part of his person, except his hands . . . ’: there is no mention of subsequent running. Leicestershire began the new campaign in 1907 disastrously, losing the first five matches, but gradually the new captain, Sir Arthur Hazlerigg (later the first Baron) of Noseley Hall, instilled a new spirit in the team, which began to win matches by mid-July to Successes and Disappointments 64 27 Unattributed quotation in John Major, More than a Game: the Story of Cricket’s Early Years , p 109.