Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

‘oil firm’ making shellac. 37 ) Certainly he kept fit with digging his garden which he kept ‘quite beautiful’. At no time does he seem to have had serious financial problems. He had inherited some money from his father, and his wife had brought some into the marriage. His position, then, with whatever business interests he had, was, even when he had no earnings from cricket, far superior to that of most of his fellow-professionals. He was indeed rather better off than his much later successor as Leicestershire’s left-arm all-rounder, the Australian Jack Walsh, the sight upon whose mantelpiece of jars labelled ‘rates’, ‘electricity’, ‘water’ etc., to aid from small change the ultimate necessity of paying the respective bills, so affrighted his two fellow-countrymen Murray Sargent and Philip Saunders that they abandoned all thought of a career in English county cricket and scurried back to the Antipodes. It seems that for the first three years of the war King played little cricket, five matches in 1915 and one in 1917 being the only ones now traceable. Nonetheless, the summer of 1918 found him as professional for Eccleshill, a place with a long history of cricket, for one Sunday in the mists of time, as legend has it, the parish clerk, also a local umpire, one Lingard by name, upon awakening from a sermon-induced slumber, confounded his neighbours’ Amens with a sonorous and different term of closure – ‘Over’. In this last summer of the War Eccleshill, with four wins, eight losses and eight draws, finished 16th out of 20 in the Bradford League. King’s appointment was announced in the Bradford Daily Argus only on 20 April: ‘There was a goodly gathering of talented players, amongst whom was King, of Leicester County, Eccleshill’s latest capture’. The appointment was in part ‘to formulate a nursery for young players’. King came 14th in the League batting averages with 384 runs at 29.53, his highest innings being 100 and 60* in the two matches against Tong Park and 65 against Great Horton, for which last he had for a while as partner his county colleague C.J.B.Wood. His century was remarkable in that he hit 11 fours in his first 47 runs and 19 in all in his final total of 100. He was 22nd in the bowling averages with 43 wickets at 14.06, his best performance being seven wickets for 18 against Idle, and he often had opponents ‘in difficulties with [his] deliveries’. Interlude 93 37 After his playing career had ended he occasionally reported himself as an ‘oil merchant’.