Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

justifying his place in a side that did remarkably well to finish equal ninth with Derbyshire and above, among others, Middlesex and Sussex. He eased himself into first-class cricket again with 7 and 42 at Trent Bridge, after an ‘impressive’ memorial service conducted at the ground by the Bishop of Southwell for those cricketers who had lost their lives in the recent sanguinary conflict. Then, in the very next game, against Derbyshire, he scored ‘with confidence and serenity’ over 40% of his side’s runs with 59 and 82. For his main contributions with the bat thereafter he dominated the first innings against Yorkshire with ‘a necessarily somewhat restrained’ 67 out of 161, the tail-ender J.S.Curtis scoring 34 but no other batsman more than 13; and to conclude the season made 64 at Coventry. That this last was out of a total of 285 suggests that it was nothing remarkable, but Warwickshire had just been humiliated by being bowled out (literally) for 48 and King, unusually opening the innings, promptly lost his partner Wood, bowled also (for a single), as were the next two batsmen to make 13 in a row. Then, ‘with resolution against the odds’, King proceeded to show his team-mates that the terrors of the pitch were, at least in part, imaginary. Fittingly he was not out at the end of the match, which Leicestershire won by ten wickets. His best bowling came in a single week in June when he took five for 45 and three for 36 at Northampton and then six for 36 and three for 84 at home against Gloucestershire. This latter match was the first ever between these two counties, Leicestershire having been considered too humble opponents in the time of Grace and up to the great societal levelling created by the First World War. King was largely responsible for the victory, since he scored 51 in his county’s first innings of 285 and then bowled unchanged with Geary to force Gloucestershire to follow on – all on the first day. Shortly before the beginning of the 1920 season, with its return to a full programme of three-day matches, King turned 49. To the astonishment of friends and foes he took exactly 100 wickets at an average of 17.65, only two one-hundredths of a run more than in his great season of 1912. Moreover, since he did not play in any extraneous matches, every single wicket was taken in the Championship, the only time that he ever achieved that feat. With a rejuvenated Astill taking 97 wickets Leicestershire, despite record crowds to replenish the coffers, must have been Nestor 97