Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

The committee gave him also £1 10s 0d as ‘talent money’ this year, even though his cricket was restricted to two matches: he batted with some success against both Yorkshire and Lancashire, including ‘a gallant show’ of 60 at Leeds, before being bowled by his bête-noire Hirst, to help bring a rare victory over the ‘Tykes’; but he bowled only six overs for a single wicket in the two games. Surgery was necessary. His daughter claimed that he had to pay an extra guinea to ensure that he was operated on with gloves; and his caution paid off since there was no infection and he was fit for the start of the following season and performed some of his most memorable feats in the next four years until the outbreak of war. The season of 1910 saw the début of a man from George Geary’s birthplace of Barwell, a certain Albert Callington, who jocularly insisted on being known throughout his career by the surname of Lord (as he appears on all scorecards and in all newspaper reports) on the ground that the county already had a Knight and a King. 33 It is unknown whether it gave King any qualms by drawing attention to the meaning of his name, which probably originated as either a similar crotchet or from the rôle in a pageant play, in light of the local superstition, known from the early 1300s, that ‘misfortune would attend any king who entered the town of Leicester’, a prognostication probably based upon the fates of Edmund Ironside, Harold Godwinson, William II and Edward II and kept alive by those of many subsequent monarchs. 34 He was, of course, aware of his putative descent from Robert I, king of the Scots, since he named his daughter Margaret Bruce. Lord’s whimsicality was picked up in one stanza of Arthur B.Talbot’s ‘A New Bawl’ in praise of the county’s cricketing heroes which was published in the club’s Jubilee Souvenir of 1928: For years of all-round service we must sing A verse of gratitude to J.H.King. Four Kings in turn are seen upon the sward, A Knight of cut and thrust, and eke a Lord. And lo, we cry ‘What oh!’ to Sammy Coe, ‘And may his shadow never smaller grow.’ 80 Maturity 33 This whimsicality extended, according to Tom Belton, an elderly resident of Barwell, even to members of the county cricketer’s family playing in village games. 34 In the 1881 Census, the surname King, though not anywhere rare, was most commonly found in South-East England rather than in the East Midlands.