Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

King). The only other bowlers whose tally of wickets was in double figures were Bill Shipman with 27 at huge cost and Jack Curtis with 12. His season opened and closed with five-wicket hauls, for MCC against Yorkshire (to counterbalance his ‘spectacles’ from Hirst) and for his county against Lancashire. In between these hauls two bowling feats stand out statistically. Kent’s visit to Aylestone Road was Blythe’s match, the master taking 15 wickets for 45 on a highly treacherous pitch with seven for 9 in the home team’s lowest-ever innings of 25, but King, opening the bowling, hit back with eight for 26, which he followed with a resolute 49, his county’s top score, in the second innings. Wisden comments that ‘In view of the state of the game, King’s achievement almost equalled Blythe’s’. The other feat was again in a losing cause, this time against the visiting South Africans. His analyses were five for 52 and seven for 45, thus pipping Aubrey Faulkner’s total for the match by one. In the second innings he dismissed the first four batsmen in the order, L.J.Tancred, H.W.Taylor, A.W.Nourse and Faulkner, who made only 15 runs between them, the openers both being stumped by John Shields. The local correspondent even believed that he bowled some deliveries that ‘actually broke the other way to his usual one’ (i.e. off-breaks to the right-handers). One other match provided him with ten wickets (for 117 runs against Derbyshire at Ashby-de-la-Zouch in 62.4 overs). In addition he twice he took seven wickets in an innings ( v Kent at Dover and Warwickshire at Hinckley). In two consecutive innings in June he and Astill bowled out the opposition unchanged ( v Worcestershire at Stourbridge in a rain-ruined match limited to a single innings each side and in the first innings v Warwickshire at Nuneaton to help their county to victory by a meagre three runs). Indeed this pair of spin bowlers, left- and right-handed, frequently opened the bowling; and King himself was entrusted with the new ball in every match but two, in one of which by reason of rain the opposition never batted. And he was not given long spells only when the wicket suited him: seven times he bowled at least 35 overs in an innings, the most being 58 against Nottinghamshire at Leicester and 53 (with a further 23 in the second innings) for MCC against Oxford University. In view of all this bowling (some 930 six-ball overs in the season) it is a measure of the strength and determination of this elderly cricketer that he had any energy at all left for batting. Nonetheless, despite his rigours in the field, he scored an unbeaten and Maturity 85