Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

King’s return to continuous cricket in 1911 was on the whole moderate. His 1,187 runs were scored at an average of 28.95, and his 73 wickets were expensive at 31.42 each, although early on the local paper claimed that his ‘cunning of hand and brain has evidently not suffered from his enforced idleness last year’. Two feats stand out. The first is simply a statistical anomaly. A century against Lancashire was in those days always a notable performance, but in his ‘resolute and sound’ 103 not out at Old Trafford, King reached 96 with 14 fours and 40 singles without ever making a hit for two or three. He then cut a ball for two before ending with another single and another four to bring up his century. The second feat is one of the most outstanding individual achievements in the county’s history. Mighty Yorkshire, though winning one of the matches, encountered magnificent opposition from the minnows of Leicestershire this year. At Bradford C.J.B.Wood carried his bat for a century in each innings, a feat not equalled until the South African S.J.Cook performed it again for Somerset in 1989. At the conclusion of the match George Hirst is reported to have entered the visitors’ dressing-room and exclaimed ‘Mr Wood, when we come to Leicester for the return match, I’ll bring a pistol and, if we can’t bowl you out, we’ll shoot you’. But at Aylestone Road it was King who was principally responsible for his county’s solitary victory of the season, and that by an innings, an unique performance for the county over these opponents at the time. On a day of rioting in Glasgow in the tramwaymen’s strike, Yorkshire, facing a deficit of 67, was at one point 22 for one and later 37 for two wickets, before being humiliated on a damaged pitch drying out under a hot sun for a total of 47. Although the ‘pitch had come to the help of Leicestershire as Blucher did to Wellington at Waterloo . . . Leicestershire had outplayed the Tykes from the very beginning of the match. . . . I have never’, crowed the reporter in the Leicester Daily Mercury , ‘seen Leicestershire more melancholy, more glaringly in a state of collapse than the Yorkshire team were this morning. . . . Six [sic] ducks at a sitting ! Vae victis !’ The Leeds Mercury was perhaps even more damning: ‘the capitulation was inglorious and undignified, no fewer than seven members of the side being dismissed without scoring, which must surely be a record for the county’. King’s analysis of eight for 17 in this débâcle was remarkable enough, but his last seven wickets were taken in a mere 20 balls Maturity 81