Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

Thus the obvious choice to open the bowling with Hirst was Tom Jayes, that lion-hearted right-arm fast bowler and brilliant outfielder who had appeared against the Australians for an England XI in 1905, and for the Players, and was now enjoying a splendid season. But Jayes was sent home, whereat the Daily Express proclaimed that the feeling of disquietude among ‘the majority of the cricket public . . . grew into something like hopelessness’. Poor Jayes was never to play Test cricket, and died four years later of tuberculosis after a long illness. King, therefore, on 14 June, became the first Leicestershire cricketer to play in a home Test and only the third overall. 29 Coincidentally supporters of Birkenhead Park could also pride themselves on the third of their four England players: curiously all of them were vouchsafed a single match, although Thomas Routledge was selected four times for South Africa. 30 Obloquy was poured at the time on the selectors for their choice of King to share the opening overs with Hirst. In 1921, in its appreciation of King, The Cricketer bluntly asserted that this was ‘a compliment which, useful bowler though he is, was scarcely deserved’. Today, when not to begin with two fast bowlers is considered lunacy, this selection is condemned even more. But it can be defended, at least to a degree. In 1909, when the uncovered pitches allowed much greater variety of tactics, a slow bowler often opened. Blythe, who was slower than King, had done so at Edgbaston, on an admittedly more favourable wicket. King, as we have seen, was not really slow, and he expressed a preference for The Test-Match Player 71 29 At the time he will have been considered the second after Knight (who had played in three of the matches of the tour of Australia in 1903/04); for the first, the all-rounder Dick Pougher, had played (and successfully, dismissing three of the first six batsmen in the order for 26 runs in the only innings in which he bowled) in the county’s second-class days for W.W.Read’s England team against South Africa at Cape Town in 1891/92, when such matches were deemed of lowly status. Indeed he was best known by the cricketing fraternity for his return of five wickets for no runs for MCC against the Australians at Lord’s in 1896. 30 T.W.Routledge’s Test appearances were at King’s future home ground in South Africa, Newlands, in the only Test of the 1891/92 season, and then in the three Tests of the 1895/96 season, on all of which occasions he opened the batting for his adopted country. He never played any first-class cricket in England, although he was a member of the South African side which toured the British Isles in 1894. The other three Birkenhead players besides King to play for England were Sandford Schultz (later Storey) who was born in Birkenhead and schooled, like King’s father and grandson, at Uppingham; Reginald Wood, who was born in Cheshire and played briefly for Lancashire before emigrating to Australia, where he was co-opted into the England team for the Second Test of the 1886/87 season at Melbourne; and Norman Oldfield, who was born in Cheshire, played for Lancashire and Northamptonshire and scored 80 in the Oval Test of 1939 against the West Indies, and who played for the club after his first-class career had ended.