Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

‘because mother would not have them in the house’. King was devoted to her, and when she died at the early age of 53 he was quite bereft emotionally and ‘never the same again’. For the first few years the newly wedded couple lived in some rooms in ‘Shelbrooke’, the home that King’s new father-in-law had built in the late nineteenth century onto the pre-existing 551 Aylestone Road (‘Rutland House’) to form a semi-detached pair. This was almost opposite Duncan Road, which led to the southern entrance to the old Grace Road ground where King had begun his first-class career. It was also only about a mile’s walk from the new ground further north on the same road. The house had a large garden behind and a paddock adjacent to the Grand Union Canal, with the River Soar beyond. The area was more rural then than now, daughter Margaret learning to swim in the canal and kingfishers nesting in the bank below the arbour shown in the familial photograph. Married life perhaps helped King return to normal productivity on the cricket field the following season, 1908, in which he batted consistently, reaching fifty on twelve occasions, and increased his haul of wickets to 74, although only 51 of these were in the Championship. More significantly for the history of English cricket King was not alone in making a new beginning, for the Leicestershire committee scheduled the first match of the season (against Warwickshire) to commence on a Saturday, thus giving a trial to what was to prove of enormous financial benefit to all the counties in the Championship for many years until the recent chaotic programming consequent upon first-class cricket’s relegation to second-class status. 28 The county celebrated with a victory, and King with a second-innings 55 and a five-wicket haul that included the final dismissal of the match, a decisive ‘Field b King 0’. His best innings was at Northampton where, on a pitch of considerable difficulty, he and Sam Coe proceeded to add 249 for the fourth wicket against the hapless ‘Cobblers’ in three and a Successes and Disappointments 67 28 With regard to this innovation Eric Snow vaticinally mused in 1949 on whether ‘what Leicestershire cricket thinks to-day, English cricket thinks to-morrow’, to be proved a successful seer when in 1962 Mike Turner introduced the ‘Midlands Knock-out Competition’ (in which each county was limited to one innings consisting of a maximum of 65 overs), the immediate forerunner of the following season’s ‘Gillette Cup Competition’ and thus of all the modern cricket that is limited in overs and variety. Leicestershire celebrated the inauguration of this initial competition with a victory over Derbyshire, though subsequently losing the final to Northamptonshire.