Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

A letter was considered an ‘icon of the soul’ by the Byzantines, Michael Psellos, the great polymath of the eleventh century, once going so far as to write that he could ascertain more of a man’s character from a letter than from a personal meeting. What can we, more modestly, learn of King from this, the only surviving document written by him? Although we may infer from the careful writing and use of personal embossed stationery that this was originally intended as the letter to be sent to Mr Packer, the facts that it was preserved among his daughter’s memorabilia of her father and that it contains two corrections supra lineam in King’s hand, the second inked ‘e’ in the name of his captain Sir Arthur Hazlerigg (the first should have been stroked out) and the pencilled ‘that’ in ‘all that is’, suggest that this became merely a draft, thereby indicating that he was conscientious and did not wish the secretary to consider him slovenly. He may, however, not have been obsessively conscientious if he was willing to allow one alteration to stand when he changed his mind after the first two letters of ‘doctor’ (stroked out) and penned the grander ‘Physician’ (unless he determined at that early stage that this was not to be his final version). The hand is fluent and graceful, without the floridity often associated with the 1870s when he learned his penmanship, although he does permit himself a formalized paraph. The hand is similar, then, to what we know of his batting. The composition is that of a tolerably well-educated man. The grammar, especially the fondness for the present participle and the correct use of ‘shall’ rather than ‘will’, and even the punctuation, which defies the concept of a sentence, are typical of the period, while ‘Jho’ is a not uncommon Victorian abbreviation which has usually been taken as standing for the Latin Johannes, although scholarly doubt has recently been cast on that theory. There is but a single orthographic error, ‘disired’, apart from the mis-spelling of his captain’s name. Nothing should be read into the formal salutation and closing formula, since these are standard for the period, and would have probably been the same even if he had known the secretary for many years. The burden of his communication shows complete self-confidence: he cannot play, and feels no need either to seek the club’s permission not to appear or to apologise for what he cannot help. Only as an afterthought does he think fit to apprise Maturity 77