Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

unperturbed by the antics of its purveyor H.A.H.Smith, who ‘has a fantastic little run to the wicket, with a back-kick of the leg just before delivering the ball, like a naughty ballet-dancer’. In sterner contests he defied Surrey, also at home, with a chanceless 93 not out ‘in his very finest punishing style’, and battled against Blythe at Dover with a top score of 21 followed by a defiant 49 not out. He had five-wicket hauls in the first, second and fourth home matches of the season (against Lancashire, Kent and Worcestershire), but thereafter his bowling tailed away except for that one extraordinary match. 36 In 1912 King took 130 wickets at an average of 17.63. This was 57 wickets more for one run fewer than in the previous season and 49 more than he had ever taken before. His total was at the time the highest taken by a Leicestershire player (though not in county games alone); while his average was the lowest since the pre-first class days of Pougher in the early 1890s, and has been beaten, up to the present day, only by George Geary, in his case three times. Match after match he seemed to take five wickets in an innings, sixteen times in all, more than double his previous best of seven in 1900. The weather was abominable and the pitches often ‘soft and dead’, but he ‘developed a quality of absolute genius for bowling on this sort of wicket’. In its summation of the season the Leicester Daily Mercury averred that ‘he is now a more consummate master of attack than ever before in all his brilliant career. . . . His artifice is more varied; his judgment more subtly calculated. Always one of the most intelligent trundlers, he has never bowled badly throughout the summer.’ Since he also scored over 1,000 runs, albeit at the low average of 22.85 (but second in the Championship averages at 24.21), the strain on the stamina of a man now in his forty-second year must have been enormous. His ‘double’, though dependent upon a few runs for MCC, was the first achieved by a Leicestershire player. Yet his county finished only thirteenth in the table. The explanation is easy to see: 32 of his wickets were taken out of the Championship in which he and Astill took nearly 68% of the wickets to fall to bowlers (171 out of 253; while against the two touring teams the pair took a further 19 out of 29, 16 of them to 84 Maturity 36 In the Worcestershire match King was injured in a very odd way. In the first innings, according to Scores and Biographies , ‘when he was bowled by R.D.Burrows, the ball struck the stumps with such force that a bail shot forward and cut his face near the left eye: the wound bled for some time, but he was able to take his place in the field when Worcestershire went in.’ Indeed he opened the bowling and put up a performance that Wisden considered superior even to that of Burrows, who then proceeded to win the match for the visitors.