Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

I began to watch Leicestershire regularly from 1927 and would come to recognize the imposing figure of King from pictures in the County Ground pavilion and on his occasional visits in retirement when we were both on top of trams taking us to our respective destinations in Aylestone Park not too far apart. It might be said that he carried a benign, stately presence wherever he was. I came to know well his elder brother, James, who also played for the county. As licensee of the Avenue Hotel on Cavendish Road, Aylestone Park, adjoining Richmond Road, where our family house was, he had a rather broken-down wooden garage at the back. He agreed that I could park my equally broken-down Morris Cowley in it, as it was illegal to park on roads without lights overnight, although streets were mostly empty, and car batteries were not easily come by. James was perhaps a cut above the typical pub licensee. For a breath of fresh air at the end of closing time he would declare in a cultured tone that he would take a stroll, and then he would walk to Cavendish Road via Lansdowne Road, passing our house on the way back to his pub, followed by two dogs without leads and a very large tabby cat matching his majestic pace. I thought him solemn, like his son J.W., whose lack of success with Worcestershire and Leicestershire was a deep disappointment. On 21 August 1940 James’ hotel had a very near miss when, in daylight, a German aeroplane dropped a string of bombs, Leicester’s first ever, along the terraced houses on the opposite side of Cavendish Road, killing nine, including some of his customers, and shattering the rear windows of our house. J.H.King I came to know as Jack from his brother’s references about him to me. When I eventually met him, I of course never addressed him as other than Mr King. In the spring of 1934 I was anxious to obtain any sort of practice for my last year in the Alderman Newton’s School team, where my opening partner was Maurice Tompkin. (He toured Pakistan with an MCC team and there has been no more distinguished Newtonian cricketer before or since.) I cajoled a junior friend from the nearby Saffron Lane estate – he was to be the father of Rosie Winterton, now Minister of State at the Department for Work and Pensions – to bowl to me. He was as wildly lacking in direction as Harmison. We were on a sports ground, the whole turf covered with plantains from the canal alongside flooding in winters, when Foreword 7