Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

elopement from Haddon Hall. King’s bride, following an engagement of eight years, was Florence Norton, the daughter of a mill-furnisher. She was 30, he 36. It was a very happy marriage and they had one daughter, Margaret Bruce, born on 15 February 1909. Florence was a remarkable woman in her own right. Their daughter remembered her keeping fit by riding a penny-farthing bicycle and walking on stilts in the garden, two activities surely likely to have sown amazement if not consternation amongst their neighbours, and the former of which curiously brings to mind the fact that the old County Ground, on which her husband made his début for Leicestershire, had been the scene of a ‘Fifty Miles Championship’ race for penny- farthing cyclists in 1887. Nonetheless, she did not have the nerve to watch her husband bat for fear of seeing him hurt, preferring to ‘watch for him at home’ where she ‘would open the door and step out to meet him at the front gate as he got off the tram’. She ruled the household, he the garden, which ‘was huge, and he did everything’ himself. Margaret did, nevertheless, remember her father at home as ‘an excellent chef’ for the game and fish that he shot and caught himself. He had, however, to keep his shooting dogs with a friend, Arthur Brown, Successes and Disappointments 66 Florence King with daughter Margaret. John and Florence King and their daughter Margaret in the garden of their house on Aylestone Road.