A History of Kent Cricket in Fourteen Cricketers (part 6)

LORD HARRIS

George Canning, 4th Lord Harris, the Supreme Commander of Kent CCC for 50 years

What should one say about George Canning Harris, the man who was Kent cricket from his appointment to the committee of the newly formed Kent County Cricket Club in December 1870 until his death in 1932? No person has ever exerted such authority over such a long time over a county club, with the possible exception of his friend Lord Hawke in Yorkshire.

Harris was born on 3^rd February 1851 in Trinidad, where his father was serving as Governor. Of aristocratic blood and very conscious of the status and responsibilities that went with it, Harris built his life around the twin pillars of his philosophy, paternalistic duty and Kent cricket. After school at Eton, he went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied sufficiently to be awarded his degree at the end of three years, and played cricket. We should say at this point that Harris was not merely a well-born cricket enthusiast, who captained the county side because he was the most available amateur: Harris was a seriously good cricketer. It would be hard to put him on the level of Kent’s greatest batsmen, but he was good enough to play four times for England, and to end his Kent career with a batting average of 30 – very good for his era.

His influence over all cricket, not just cricket in Kent can be shown by the fact that he was variously captain, chairman, hon secretary, president and chairman of the young players’ committee, and held at least one of those positions every year from 1870, when the club was formed, until his death in 1932. He was also a member of the MCC committee from 1875 – 1889, President of the club in 1895, and a trustee for 45 years and treasurer for 35. Her also found time to serve as Governor of Bombay (now Mumbai) from 1890 until 1895, and did a great deal to promote cricket on the subcontinent while he was there.

Cricket in 1872, when Harris becomes our Kentish flag-bearer, was changing rapidly. Much of the change was brought about by the brilliance of WG Grace, who was then 24 years old and in his physical prime. His technical skills forced opponents to find ways of coping with his run-scoring brilliance, or at least try to copy it, but that was easier said than done. Nobody has ever dominated his cricketing age as much as WG did, with the possible exception of Don Bradman, but he didn’t bowl.

In Kent, however, it was a time when the greats of Willsher’s era had retired, and those who took their place were generally not of the same quality. The establishment of the Kent County Cricket Club, however, was beginning to prove a good idea. Harris had only one aim throughout his life, and that was to make Kent the top cricketing county, and although it would be fair to say that Yorkshire probably took the overall title in Harris’s time, Kent had some brilliant players and wonderful seasons, largely guided by Harris and his policies. 

Kent County Club in 1876, captained by Lord Harris

In those early days of the county club, there was still some friction between the remnants of the two clubs which had been amalgamated. Canterbury Week was the only part of the season managed by those based at St. Lawrence, while all other games were managed by the former Beverley Club and played around the county at what we would now call outgrounds, but at the time had equal status with Canterbury. One of the big problems that Kent faced was the difficulty of persuading the county’s many talented amateurs to commit regularly to playing for the county. They preferred the play country house cricket at weekends, and then come along to enjoy Canterbury for the Week, which made creating a consistent team very difficult.

Lord Harris had the huge advantage of a natural authority and a kind nature behind an often irascible appearance, so he proved very good at getting people to do what he wanted. Selection began to become more consistent as even the louchest amateurs wanted to play for Lord Harris. But to support his amateur batsman, he needed a backbone of professional players. The days of rich landowners employing cricketers as ‘gardeners’ or ‘estate managers’ were long gone, so the employer had to be Kent CCC and money was short. 

Lord Harris, lithograph by Albert Chevallier Tayler

Perhaps Harris’ greatest achievement for the county, therefore, was to persuade the many talented amateurs to play regularly for the county side rather than for one of the county’s many wandering weekend sides, while at the same time building a club which was financially viable, and able to recruit, train and pay professionals a fair wage. He gave the county side a consistency it had previously lacked, and he built on that consistency to create an increasingly hard to beat team.

Harris himself was no mean cricketer. He played for England four times and as a right hand batsman was a pillar of Kent’s batting line-up for many seasons, often opening the innings. His highest score was 176, against Sussex at the Bat And Ball Ground, Gravesend, in 1882, a match which Kent won by an innings, and he scored ten other hundreds in a 224 match career which stretched over 41 years. His right arm fast bowling was not overused, but was often effective. He was, uniquely, both captain of  Kent and Under-Secretary of State for War between 1886 and 1889, in Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government. He then went off to be Governor of Bombay from 1890, which limited his appearances for Kent but did not stop him remaining on the Kent CCC committee.

Lord Harris at Belmont, a painting now in the pavilion at Canterbury

A true giant of Kent cricket, Harris’ happiest moment was when Kent finally won the county championship in 1906, a feat he celebrated with dinners, speeches and gifts for all the members of the successful team, and most notably by commissioning the painting ‘Kent v Lancashire 1906’ by Albert Chevallier Tayler, which has rightly come to be considered as masterpiece of cricketing, and indeed all sporting art. Can I throw in a plug for my book, “Stories of Cricket’s Finest Painting, Kent v Lancashire 1906” (Pitch Publishing, 2019)? Still available on line and at all good charity bookshops.

Harris died in 1932, aged 81, at his home, Belmont House near Throwley, where the cricket ground he established is still used every season, and where the family archive is stored. Well worth a visit.

A History of Kent Cricket in Fourteen Cricketers (part 5)

Ned Willsher

On 11^th and 12^th July 1850, Surrey played Kent at the Kennington Oval, and for the first time Alfred Mynn and Edgar Willsher played together for Kent. Fuller Pilch was also playing for Kent, but despite the presence of these three major names in the history of Victorian cricket in Kent, Surrey won easily, by an innings and 110 runs. None of our three disgraced themselves – indeed Willsher took 4 wickets and made a catch in Surrey’s innings, while Pilch and Mynn both made one decent score out of their two innings, but as seems to be the case when one great name hands the baton over to another Kent legend, the match in which this happens rarely goes well for Kent. Over the next four years, Willsher and Mynn played together for Kent a number of times, but their last appearance together for Kent – which was also Fuller Pilch’s final first-class match – in August 1854, resulted in another defeat for Kent, at the hands of England, a match played as part of Canterbury Cricket Week that year.

Edgar Willsher (known as Ned) was born, apparently with only one lung, on 22^nd November 1828 in Rolvenden. He was the youngest of his farmer parents’ fourteen children, and was only 21 years old when his long career as a Kent player began. He was a left handed batsman and bowler, and although his batting was not particularly outstanding, his contemporaries were fulsome in their praise of his bowling. He still ranks 16^th in the list of Kent’s all-time wicket-takers, and in the opinion of Lord Harris, who only played with him when Willsher was past his best, described him as ‘one of the finest cricketers Kent ever produced’. The Nottinghamshire batsman Richard Daft (1835-1900) wrote that of the three great bowlers of the Victorian era – Willsher, JC Shaw and Alfred Mynn – “at his very best I believe Willsher was the best of the trio. He was faster, and his ball got up more than those of the other two”.

In comparison with modern day fast bowlers, he was probably slower, probably around Underwood pace, but imagine Derek Underwood on similarly underprepared wickets – a batter’s nightmare. What is more, is this era of round arm bowling, when raising the arm above shoulder height was illegal, Willsher was one of the bowlers who tested this law to its limits with his action, described by Daft as “rather a peculiar one…..I believe that when the ball left his hand it was exactly on a level with his shoulder. He came up to the wicket with a quick-march kind of step, raised his hand high above his head, bringing it down, however, with a very quick jerky movement just as he delivered”. Clearly there were many who felt that his action was not always within the law as it stood. So just as John Willes had fought for round-arm rather than underarm bowling, now Willsher, 40 years later, was in the thick of the fight to legalise overarm bowling.

Ned Willsher

John Willes, George Knight and others had won the fight to legalise round-arm bowling, but very quickly bowlers who tried this form of delivery realised that raising the arm higher than the shoulder was an even more effective of bowling. Several leading cricketers, notably William Lillywhite, were pretty flagrant in their breaching of this law, as well as Willsher, who largely got away with it, until a plan was concocted to force the issue. Willsher was picked to play for an England team against Surrey at the Oval in August 1862. One of the umpires was John Lillywhite, the son of William and a personal friend of Willsher. The events that followed were melodramatic and almost certainly carefully planned. England batted first, and compiled a total of 503 (Willsher 54) over the first day and a half. When Surrey batted, Willsher opened the bowling with his captain Vyell Walker. Umpire Lillywhite looked carefully at Willsher’s action, and gave him several warnings, until in the third over, he no-balled Willsher six times. Willsher threw down the ball and mimicking John Willes, strode from the field, taking most of the team with him. There was no more play that day, and the complete England team took the field the next morning, but John Lillywhite did not. He was replaced by another umpire for the remainder of the match, and it was agreed that Willsher should be allowed to bowl in his usual style. He did, taking 6 for49 as Surrey were bundled out for 102. The match ended as a draw, but the newspapers at the time were unequivocal in their indecisiveness “Rule 10 must either be altered or enforced”. But they also took time to call Willsher “as fine a cricketer and as good a fellow as ever handled a bat or trolled a ball”. Two years later, all restrictions on the height of the arm at delivery were abolished.

Willsher (left, at stumps) bowling for Kent v Surrey in 1862

During Willsher’s long stay in the Kent eleven, there were other big changes. In 1859, largely because of the continuing shaky finances of Canterbury Cricket Week, a new Kent County Cricket Club was formed. It was felt that the committee in charge of Canterbury Week were not interested in the cricket, but only in the festivities in the city, and the secretary, William de Chair Baker, was a difficult man. Baker fought hard not to have his authority taken away from him, but at a meeting in Maidstone on 1^st  March that year, the club was formed, with Lord Darnley as President, and W South Norton and Lord North as joint secretaries (all points covered, you might say). William de Chair Baker and his Beverley Club remained in charge of Canterbury Week, but the new club had control of the other Kent matches. For a while, they imagined this state of affairs could work, and the shortage of money persisted. From the mid-1860s onwards, there was new pressure to unite the two clubs, but de Chair Baker always refused. Finally, at a meeting of the committee of the Kent County Cricket Club, it was resolved that ‘this meeting is of the same opinion with regard to amalgamation with the Beverley Club as that expressed in a report issued in 1865’, which Baker had turned down flat. Rather than try a formal approach to the Beverley Club, it was decided to use the diplomatic skills of Herbert Knatchbull-Hugessen, a keen cricket supporter from a wealthy Kent family based at Mersham, near Ashford, and thus it was that the Beverley men were persuaded to attend a meeting held on 6 December 1870 at the Bull Hotel in Rochester. It was significant that Rochester was just on the right side of the Medway to be in East Kent, part of the Beverley Club’s sphere of cricketing influence, and when the motion for the amalgamation of the two clubs was proposed, to the relief of all, it was finally passed. It is this date that the current Kent County Cricket Club claims as its foundation.

As Ned Willsher’s cricket career was coming to an end, big changes were taking place in cricket. Several counties created their own cricket clubs around this time, and from 1864, an unofficial but nevertheless well noticed method of ranking the county clubs was developed, so that a Champion County for the summer was able to be nominated. Kent, so long a powerhouse of cricket, was never Champion.

In retrospect one of the biggest developments in English cricket was the publication of the first Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack in 1864, at the time perhaps only one of several cricket annuals on the market, but soon to become the unofficial voice of the cricket establishment, with increasing influence over the way the game was played. In the same year, overarm bowling was finally legalised and WG Grace made his first-class debut. As cricket became more popular around the world, Willsher was not to be left out. In 1868 he captained an England team that visited the United States and Canada, playing 6 matches against odds. The Englishmen won 5 and drew one of the matches. How things had changed since Willsher’s debut in 1850.

In July 1871, MCC staged a “Married vs. Single” for Willsher’s benefit, a sign of how highly he was regarded by the whole cricket establishment. The Single Men won by an innings, largely thanks to a century from their opening bat, one WG Grace, and the benefit raised £73/9/- (£73.45 in new money) for Willsher, a tidy sum in those days.

On 29^th, 30^th and 31^st July 1872, Kent played Sussex at the Angel Ground, Tonbridge. For the first time, Willsher and George Canning Harris, the future Lord High Everything of Kent cricket, played together in a Kent side. Despite Ned Willsher’s magnificent all-round performance, nine for 151 in the match, as well as 53 runs undefeated, Kent lost by 148 runs. Harris scored 8 and 13. Once again, the handing over of the baton from one Kent player to the next in the chain was not combined with success on the pitch. Maybe we should concentrate more on the last time they played together for Kent, against Hampshire at Catford on 17^th and 18^th June 1875, a game that Kent won by an innings and 3 runs. Harris scored 92, and Willsher took 5 for 45 across the two innings, including the final wicket to win the match. A fitting end to a wonderful career.

Willsher died on 7^th October 1885, in Lewisham, aged 56, always remembered as one of the greatest of all cricketers of the mid-Victorian golden age of Kent cricket.

A History of Kent Cricket in Fourteen Cricketers (part 4)

Alfred Mynn – The Lion of Kent

Alfred Mynn – a big man

On 7^th and 8^th July 1834, a match was played at Lord’s, billed as England versus Kent. England won the game in a canter, by eight wickets. The Kent team contained several players who are still known as giants of the early years of cricket in the county, but they were no match for England, led by Fred Lillywhite. Kent were dismissed for 21 in their first innings, to which England replied with 61. Kent’s second innings was better – 72 all out – but it took England little time to score the 33 runs they needed for victory.

The real significance of this game was not so much the size of the defeat, but that it was the first time that Alfred Mynn had played for a team described as Kent, and it was one of the last games that Herbert Jenner played for Kent. Thus the baton was passed. Interestingly, that match featured another giant of Kent’s superb early Victorian team, Fuller Pilch, although he was playing for England this time.

Alfred Mynn was a giant of Kent cricket in all ways. Lord Harris described him as six feet one tall, and his average weight when playing was from 18 to 20 stones. He became known as ‘The Lion Of Kent’ and as an article to celebrate the centenary of Mynn’s birth observed, he ‘was no believer in canary-bird diet. ‘Beef and Beer’ was what he declared to be his sustenance on the field, and when asked what else he took, ‘Beer and Beef’ was his answer’.

Mynn was born in Goudhurst on 19^th January 1807, and was taught the basics of cricket by local landowner John Willes. As he grew, he became a much feared fast bowler and an extremely capable batsman. His round-arm bowling was, in his early years, not particularly accurate, but that made it all the more dangerous, because among his less than lethal deliveries would be the occasional ripper that no batsman of his day could do anything about. As his experience grew, so did his accuracy and by the end of his career he was acknowledged as the greatest all-rounder of his time, the natural predecessor of WG Grace. His batting, too, was among the best of his era. Probably his friend and team-mate Fuller Pilch could be ranked higher, but he was an essential part of the Kent side for a quarter of a century until 1859.

Kent at this time was undoubtedly the strongest of the county sides, and as the humourist William Prowse noted:

                  ‘With five such mighty cricketers ‘twas but natural to win/ As Felix, Wenman, Hillyer, Fuller Pilch and Alfred Mynn.’

Mynn – the deadly round-arm bowler

In 1835, as Mynn was establishing his reputation, the Beverley Club was formed in Canterbury, and the control of cricket was slowly passing from the rich benefactors of the previous century to the local clubs, and in due course, to the county clubs. In 1842, the first Canterbury Week was held. What was originally seen as an opportunity for the Beverley Club to make some money and to enjoy the city at the height of the summer, quickly became the focus of the cricketing and social year within the county. This was obviously partly due to the fact that the Kent side was very strong at this time, so the Week provided an opportunity for cricket fans to see the best players in the country in action. It was also an opportunity for people to gamble on the outcome. In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, horse racing at Barham Downs near Canterbury was very popular, but from the 1830s, the race meetings became more and more infrequent, and there was no focus for the gentry nor the commoners down on holiday from the capital to enjoy themselves en masse. Canterbury Cricket Week, in its own way, began to fill that gap, both as a spectacle and as an event to bet on. At the end of the 1842 season, the Beverley Club reformed themselves as the Kent Cricket Club, a short-lived venture as it turned out, but the first attempt to create a county-wide club.

The first time Alfred Mynn played an important match in Canterbury was at the Beverley Ground in 1841. Kent played England and were beaten by 74 runs, but Mynn took eleven wickets and opened the batting with his brother Walter. Fuller Pilch, Ted Wenman, William Hillyer and William Martingell were among the famous names in the Kent side, men who would build their reputation and that of the county over the next twenty years or so. 

The statistics of Mynn’s career are very impressive. A batting average of 13.42 and only one hundred to his name might not seem particularly impressive, but centuries were hard to come by in those days of poorly prepared wickets, and his 1038 wickets at 10.33, along with 125 catches show the value of this giant of a man to his side. We could add that his bulk was such that he was not very quick between the wickets, and he was run out in a remarkably high proportion of his innings.

As a bowler, he was peerless in his era, and not until WG Grace came along, three years after Mynn had died, was there anybody to challenge him as an all-round cricketer. His bowling was round-arm, fast and very accurate: he must have been a real terror on the wickets of the time.

Mynn played for a number of teams besides those who boasted the name of Kent. He played for the Gentlemen against the Players many times from 1832, and he was one of the original members of William Clarke’s All England XI, a commercial venture put together in 1846. Mynn was a very popular member of every team he played for, and not just because he brought runs and wickets with him.

When Mynn died, after a short illness, aged only 54, WJ Prowse wrote these lines which still echo through the history of Kent cricket:

“With his tall and stately presence, with his nobly moulded form,
His broad hand-’twas ever open! his brave heart-’twas ever warm! 
All were proud of him, all loved him!  and as the changing seasons pass 
As our Champion lies a-sleeping underneath the Kentish grass; 
Proudly, sadly we will name him – to forget him were a sin; 
Lightly lie the turf upon thee, kind and manly Alfred Mynn!”

A History of Kent Cricket in 14 Cricketers (3)

Herbert Jenner

From 16^th to 18^th June 1828, the Marylebone Cricket Club played Kent at Lord’s. Kent won the game by six wickets, and much of the credit for the victory must go to Herbert Jenner, and rather less to John Deedes. Jenner took four of the eight wickets that are credited to bowlers, and scored an unbeaten 33 in Kent’s second innings to guide his team home. He also stumped MCC’s top scorer, George Parry, for 41, which was incidentally Parry’s highest ever first-class score. Deedes scored 5 runs in the first innings, and took one catch. He did not bowl. Thus another link in our chain was established.

Herbert Jenner was a major figure in Kent cricket throughout the nineteenth century. He was born in 1806 and lived to the great age of 98 years and 5 months, dying in 1904, still renowned as a cricketer, even though he had retired from top class cricket in 1836, the year before Queen Victoria came to the throne. He went to school at Eton College, playing for their first XI in 1822 and 1823, and from there went up to Cambridge. He was the last survivor of the very first Oxford v Cambridge match in 1827, captaining Cambridge in that drawn game. 

The first time a cricket match between the two universities had been proposed was in 1821, when Cambridge challenged Oxford to a match. Unfortunately, according to the magazine “Bell’s Life”, ‘owing to the unfavourable state of the weather last Monday, the match between Oxford and Cambridge was postponed to a future day’. That future day turned out to be six years later, when Charles Wordsworth of Oxford (and of the poet’s family) proposed the match to Jenner, and it was duly arranged to be played at Lord’s on 4^th June. The match was not approved by the Oxford authorities, and Wordsworth could only manage to come to London for the game by telling the dean of his college that he had a dental appointment there. The match, rather unsatisfactorily, ended in a draw after one day, with only one innings completed by each side – Oxford 258 all out, Cambridge 92 all out. Presumably, Wordsworth could not persuade the dean that his dental appointment would last two days. Of Cambridge’s 92, Jenner, batting at number 3, made 47, and bowled almost throughout the Oxford innings, taking 5 wickets. He also kept wicket at the other end when he was not bowling.

Fifty years later, in 1877, at a Jubilee Dinner, an ‘ode’ was sung lustily by the assembled diners. The first verse went:  “Fifty years have sped since first/ Keen to win their laurel/ Oxford, round a Wordsworth clustered,/ Cambridge under Jenner mustered/ Met in friendly quarrel.”

Jenner was a very good batsman, perhaps not in the very top class of his era, and also a good bowler, described as a lob bowler, who bowled, according to the cricket historian Arthur Haygarth, ‘semi-underarm’. For most people, though, his strength was his wicket-keeping. He was described as ‘Jenner, of wicket-keepers the King’, and thus clearly takes his place at the start of the long line of great Kent wicket-keepers. He stood back from the stumps rather further than was then the practice, but probably not anywhere near as far back as keepers these days stand back to Jofra Archer, for instance, which meant, Lord Harris noted he ‘was therefore a better hand at fielding ‘draws to the leg’ and ‘tips to the off’. Taking him altogether, his performances have been surpassed by very few gentleman cricketers’. As was normal at that time, he wore no protective equipment such as pads or gloves when keeping wicket, which explains how with little difficulty he could bowl and keep wicket in alternate overs. In the words of a rhyme by Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, one of the founders of I Zingari,  “They didn’t mind a few stingers/ And they didn’t wear India-rubber fingers.” Another admirer wrote that, on the other hand, “Wicket-keeper, or bowler, or batter, in all/ He is good, but perhaps he shines most with the ball”.

Herbert Jenner-Fust, a cricketer all his life

Poor Herbert Jenner seems to have been fated to be stalked relentlessly by doggerel writers.

Having read law at Cambridge, he became fully qualified as a lawyer in 1835, and the following year gave up serious cricket. He had already been President of MCC in 1833, but from 1836, his legal career took precedence over top class cricket. That is not to say that he lost his interest in the game, nor that he gave up playing. He played for several Kent clubs for many years until 1864, when the terms of an inheritance meant that he added the hyphenated “-Fust” to his surname and moved to Gloucestershire. There, he continued to play for his village, Hill, until well into his seventies. In 1880 he played his final match for the village against local rivals Rockhampton, and as was his usual practice, he bowled from one end and kept wicket from the other (even though by now all keepers except him wore pads and gloves). Apparently ‘in various ways he got ten wickets, besides helping to run two men out’. His one concession to his age was the use of a runner when batting, but sadly this proved his downfall, when after scoring 11, his runner failed to make his ground and Jenner-Fust was run out. The bat he used in this game had been given to him in 1831 by the then secretary of MCC, Benjamin Aislabie. And Hill won the match.

Despite becoming the longest lived first-class cricketer, a record that was not beaten until F.A. MacKinnon, another Kent player, passed his age in 1946, and despite living in Gloucestershire from the year that cricket’s greatest player made his first-class debut, it is said that Herbert Jenner-Fust never ‘took the trouble to see W.G. Grace play’.

A History of Kent Cricket in Fourteen Cricketers (Part 2)

2. John Deedes

Playing alongside John Willes in that match at Lord’s, if only for a few balls before Willes rode off in high dudgeon, was John Deedes, the second man in our chain of Kent cricketers. John Deedes, a right-handed batsman of modest success, is perhaps the least significant of all the links in the chain, and certainly not a great name in Kent cricket history, but his family over the years contributed a great deal to the game.

John Deedes played only a handful of games for teams that can be described as ‘Kent’, but crucially for our chain, he played with both John Willes and our next man in, Herbert Jenner, which some more accomplished cricketers of his time, notably his brother William and Jane Austen’s nephew George Knight, did not. The Deedes estate was at Sandling Park, near Hythe, which fortunately was large enough to accommodate the entire family, as John was one of eight brothers and nine sisters. Born in 1803, he would only have been nineteen years old when he played in the Willes match, and such is the number of his siblings that it is even possible that the “J. Deedes” in that match was another of his brothers, Julius. But probably not.

John Deedes only played 8 matches for ‘Kent’, and only one of those games was played within the county, at the Vine, Sevenoaks. Most of Deedes’ matches were played at Lord’s, and he rarely distinguished himself. He played for a variety of different teams, including Single v Married (he never married), Gentlemen v Players and twice for teams described as ‘England’. Lord Harris, in his ‘History of Kent County Cricket’, described him as ‘a good batsman’, although his top score was only 29 not out, and he never bowled in great matches. In 1826 he was called to the Bar, and played no more top class cricket after 1829. His brother William, who was seven years older than John, had a more distinguished cricketing career, and was elected president of M.C.C. in 1831, at a time when the club was establishing its pre-eminence in English cricket, largely because of the excellent quality of the Lord’s wicket. Three more names in our chain were also elected president of M.C.C. in later years.

The story of cricket in the late Georgian period is shrouded in clouds of uncertainty, much of it caused by the fire on 28 July 1825, which burnt down the pavilion at Lord’s and the vast majority of its archive. That is  not to say that Lord’s was the only place where cricket was played, but the records of the club which staged the most prestigious matches of the era would have told us a great deal more about how the game was evolving at that time. Cricket was re-establishing itself as a pastime for the rich, and slowly, as a profession for the skilled artisan after the uncertainties of the Napoleonic wars, and clubs that were based around villages and towns, as well as those created by wealthy benefactors, were multiplying. The Deedes family were among those benefactors, although John himself devoted himself more to his legal work, mainly as Recorder of the city of Canterbury for 27 years. He died in 1885, aged 81.

Such is John Deedes’ contribution to Kent cricket and the life of the community in general that no image of him seems to be on the internet, and the best I could manage is this rather blurry one of his brother, William, who was also a better cricketer and local MP for many years. Still, John, not William, is the link in our chain.

A History of Kent Cricket in Fourteen Cricketers

To begin at the beginning – that would be good, if only we could. Do we start with the shepherds playing an ancestor of cricket on the weald in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or do we start with the first county match, Kent v Surrey at Dartford in 1709, or perhaps the first ‘great’ match for which we have a scorecard, the match on 18 June 1744 between Kent and All England at the Royal Artillery Ground in London, immortalised by James Love in his Cricket: An Heroic Poem? Kent won that game by one wicket, showing the strength of cricket in the county almost 300 years ago. Remember, this was before a couple of decades before the Hambledon Club established its dominance in English cricket.

However, there is so little reliable evidence of regular cricket in those times, that perhaps it is better to begin with the arrival on the cricket field of the first of Kent’s great players and innovators, John Willes, in 1806. So I will.

From him, we will trace the history of Kent cricket through fourteen men, whose careers overlapped by at least one match in which they both played, giving an unbroken chain of Kentish team-mates over 219 years, from 1806 to 2025.

1. John Willes

John Willes was born in Headcorn in 1778, into a prosperous landowning family. With little need to earn a living apart from collecting rents, he devoted much of his time to sport, notably hunting (he kept his own pack of hounds and was a renowned marksman) and cricket. He has been described as a typical Regency gentleman, ‘dare-devil, utterly fearless, generous with his money and betting heavily on the games he played’, as RL Arrowsmith wrote in his 1971 history of Kent cricket. We first come across him playing for a team described as ‘Kent’ in 1806, the year after Nelson’s victory and death at the Battle of Trafalgar, against England at Bowman’s Lodge, Dartford on August 5^th and 6^th. Kent won by 127 runs, although Willes’ contribution was just 7 and 2. He was famed mainly as a bowler, and it was his bowling which brought him fame, some infamy and cricketing immortality.

Cricket at this time was a very different game to what it became 60 years later, with a wicket that was smaller than it is today (24 inches high and 7 inches wide, as opposed to 28 inches high and 9 inches wide today) and a pitch that was very much less well prepared than today, indeed very often hardly prepared at all. That made batting often painful and sometimes downright dangerous, and bowling often a matter of luck. Willes knew that David Harris of Hambledon, perhaps the quickest and best bowler of the previous generation, managed to make the ball bounce more than his contemporaries, and Willes found a way to emulate him almost by mistake. His sister, Christiana, and her dress sense, plays an important part in the story, as John used to ask his sister to bowl at him when he wanted some batting practice. In the style of the time, Christiana wore skirt with full crinoline petticoats which ballooned out so far that she could not bowl underarm without her hand getting caught in her skirts. So she bowled while keeping her arm above the level of her skirts, i.e. round-arm. John found this style of bowling much harder to play than underarm, and tried it himself. Soon he was using this method in all his matches, and he usually got away with it, despite round-arm bowling being illegal. It was said at the time that Willes, his sister Christiana and his pet dog, which he had trained to fetch the ball, were a match for any cricket team in England. 

His round-arm bowling created a schism in the cricket world, with players and administrators taking up strongly opposed views as to the legality of this new style. One of Willes’ most vocal supporters was George Knight of Godmersham, Jane Austen’s nephew and himself a fine cricketer. Opposed to him was William Ward, an influential voice within MCC, and Lord Frederick Beauclerk, a roguish aristocratic priest and inveterate gambler, who was also incidentally a very fine cricketer. In 1816 was introduced to attempt to ban round-arm bowling, but it was difficult to interpret and different umpires held different views. So Willes continued to bowl in his new style, largely unpenalized.

At this time, although top class cricket was bound by laws first drawn up over fifty years earlier, and the Marylebone Cricket Club had been formed in 1787, there was still no formal organisation of county clubs, so any team called ‘Kent’ was really just a collection of the best men in the county that the particular match sponsor could find. There were no professional cricketers as such, although there were men employed by rich cricket loving landowners as gardeners or groundsmen, who were really there just to win cricket matches for their employer. There were, however, already two cricket ball manufacturers in the county, Duke’s at Penshurst, established in the 1760s, and Reader’s at Teston, established in 1808, which shows that the spread of the game, at least in the south-eastern corner of England, was enough to encourage businesses to be built around it.

John Willes, on horseback, but probably not in high dudgeon.

The round-arm argument was still raging when Willes captained Kent versus MCC at Lord’s of 15^th July 1822. Lord Frederick Beauclerk was playing for MCC and was determined that the umpires should do their duty, especially as he knew that Willes, bowling in his round-arm style, was the most dangerous bowler that MCC would be facing in this game. MCC batted first, and after an uncontroversial first over, Willes opened the bowling from the other end. Almost immediately, he was no-balled, by the umpire who was either in the pay of, or else much intimidated by, Lord Frederick. As is recorded, Willes immediately left the field, jumped onto his horse and rode away from Lord’s “in high dudgeon”, and was never seen on a cricket field again. Kent were allowed a substitute for the remainder of the game, and despite the absence of their captain Willes and the machinations of Beauclerk, Kent won by 127 runs.

Thus ended the career of the first great innovator, and perhaps one of the great bowlers, in Kent’s cricket history. 

How much of the story of his sister’s petticoats is true and how much has grown in myth over the centuries is for others to decide, but Willes was certainly the first man to bowl in great matches in a style that was not underarm, and he definitely did ride off from Lord’s “in high dudgeon”. He died in 1852, aged 75. His tombstone in Sutton Valence churchyard bore the inscription, “He was a patron of all manly sports and the first to introduce round arm bowling in cricket”.

KCHT Chair’s Statement at AGM 2025

At the Annual General Meeting of the Kent Cricket Heritage Trust, held on 10 May at the Spitfire St. Lawrence Ground, Canterbury, the chair made his annual statement as follows:

“I am happy that I can report on another interesting and invigorating year for the Heritage Trust. Progress has not always been as rapid as we would like, but for this we are happy to blame the ECB, whose selling of the franchises to their monstrous invention, The Hundred, has dominated our thinking and put a brief brake on our plans to develop a ‘Heritage Hub’ at Canterbury. I am very pleased to say that we have the full and enthusiastic backing of the club board for this project, but in order to use any of the money earned by Kent as a result of the franchise sales, we will have to submit a detailed budget and marketing plan to justify the spend, before any money is released. This is something we will begin in earnest once the franchise deals have been finalised and we know what our financial position will be.

“Having said that, the result of the sales of the Hundred franchises has been much higher than the ECB could have hoped, so there will be more money available for all the projects that the club is hoping to develop over the next few years.

“We have been taking a deeper look at what is in our collection, and what we should keep and what, if anything, we should dispose of. We have taken the decision that any item that is not strictly a part of Kent’s cricket history (e.g., a Kent player’s England cap), or which is duplicated (e.g. several hundred scorecards), is not a crucial part of our collections, and therefore can be disposed of. As a result of this, we recently sent a number of items to auction, and have realised a gross income of around £50,000. The club, whose property the collections all are, have agreed to ringfence this income for use in the development of our Hub, and we hope and expect that there will be more sales and more contributions to the Hub fund, which is now hovering around the £100,000 mark, over the next year or two.

As our Hon. Curator reports, we have received a number of interesting donations over the past twelve months, all of which we welcome with gratitude. We are focussing on trying to build up our knowledge, archive and collection of items related to women’s cricket in Kent, and thanks to the efforts of Rosemary Piddock, in particular, we are making good progress. Many former Kent Ladies (as they were then known) have told us of their playing days and we are hoping to publish a History of Women’s Cricket in Kent before too long. Other publishing projects include a look at every hat-trick taken by a Kent bowler, and the life and times of Cuthbert ‘Pinky’ Burnup, Kent’s captain in 1903, and the only man whose bowling was ever struck for 10 off one ball.

“We also have set ourselves the task of updating Lord Harris’s History of Kent County Cricket Club, with a new appendix continuing the story over the past two decades up to the present day. This is not an easy task, as the number of players who have represented the county, in both red-ball and white-ball cricket, whether as regular contracted players, or temporary imports or loanees, has grown exponentially since the turn of the century, and there is a great deal of material to cover.

“Howard Milton continues to produce “Inside Edge”, our regular newsletter, which is now also available on the club’s website, and we hope you have all visited our website (kcht.co.uk), and seen us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X (@kcht), Instagram (@kentcricketheritagetrust), and our blog (kentcricketheritagetrust.wordpress.com). We are in the process of redesigning and updating our digital presence and will have more to announce about that in due course.

“Financially, as you will see from the accounts, we are in a strong position. Our membership remains steady at around 100 members, which is actually quite a large number when compared with heritage groups at other counties.

“Finally, I would like to thank all my fellow committee members for all their work over the past year. I cannot let this opportunity slip by without paying tribute to the man without whom we might not have much of a collection, let alone a Heritage Trust. David Robertson began working on the heritage and history of the club many years ago under the aegis of Jim Swanton, and was appointed Hon. Curator in 1999, a post he held for 20 years with great distinction. Since the formation of KCHT, he has been a pillar of support, both as curator and Trust secretary, but now he feels that age is beginning to catch with him, so he is stepping down. All I can say, on behalf of all of us involved with the history of cricket in this county, is a heartfelt thank you.”

Jonathan Rice, Chair May 2025

Purple Patches and Dying Careers

The other day I stumbled across the scorecard of a match played in 1953 – Kent v Surrey at Blackheath, on July 11th, 13^th and 14^th. Match drawn. On the surface just another drawn county match, but a little research showed there was a lot going on just below the waterline, so to speak.

It was far from the normal county championship draw of the 1950s, when stubborn batting tended to neutralize dibbly-dobbly bowling on pitches which were either more like runways than mere roads, or else made lethal by a shower or two. This game was played on a wicket which was definitely at the road end of the scale, with apparently little danger for any enterprising batter.

Kent were suffering a disastrous season under the leadership of Bill Murray Wood, while Surrey were on their way to a second successive Championship, a string of titles which would not end until 1959, when Yorkshire prevented Surrey from winning for the eighth time in a row. Bill Murray Wood was an amateur who barely deserved his place in the side on cricket skills alone, but the generally accepted idea was that by definition an amateur made a better captain than a mere professional, so Murray Wood got the job after David Clark retired – Clark himself being another example of a good club player picked to lead the county side for his perceived captaincy skills.

Two players in this match were enjoying the best purple patches of their careers. Kent batted first, and in no time at all were dismissed for a mere 63. Purple patch number one was being enjoyed by young Surrey fast-medium bowler, Peter Loader, who went on to play 13 Tests for England despite having to compete for his place with the likes of Trueman, Statham and Tyson. In Kent’s innings he took 9 wickets for 28 runs, and would have taken all ten had Doug Wright not run himself out. This was the first of three successive games in which Loader took at least eight wickets in an innings, finishing this golden spell with 34 wickets in those three games at an average of less than 8. Wisden noted that “he gained little assistance from the pitch”. The only man who defied this onslaught was purple patchman number two, Kent’s number 6, Ted Witherden, who finished on 26 not out, up till then his highest ever first class score.

Peter “Scrubs” Loader

When Surrey batted, it was a different story. Early on, Ted Witherden took one of the nine wickets in his entire career when he enticed Bernie Constable out of his crease (st Ufton b Witherden 5) with his sporadic spin, but when Peter May joined opener Dave Fletcher, the game quickly slipped away from Kent. By close of play on the first day, Surrey had made 243 for 2, with both batters still there with centuries to their names. On day two, the slaughter continued until lunch, when Surrey declared at 302 for 5. Kent’s second innings started scarcely better than their first, and at 127 for 7 (Loader 4 wickets), they were still 112 behind Surrey with no batting of note left. But then Ted Witherden was joined at the wicket by his captain, Bill Murray Wood, who boasted a career batting average of less than 14. Together they put on 143 for the 8^th wicket, to edge Kent ahead of Surrey’s total and nudge them towards safety. Even after Murray Wood was out for 93 on the third morning with the score on 268, Witherden put on a further 55 runs for the last two wickets, with the help of Doug Wright (10) and Colin Page (16). The Kent total of 323 (Witherden 125 not out) meant that Surrey were left with 85 to make for the victory, but before they could begin their second innings, the good old Kentish rain came down and saved the home side.

Witherden, a nudger and nurdler of runs rather than a flowing off-driver of the Cowdrey school, had begun his own little purple patch, which lasted for the next three matches. He followed up his 125 not out at Blackheath with a 50 against Warwickshire in the next game, and 100 v Worcestershire in the game after that – the only two first-class centuries of his career. A low pair of scores in the next game meant he was dropped for the Canterbury Week games, and although he played fairly regularly for the county over the next two seasons, he never managed to be more than a mediocre player in a mediocre batting line up, and after the 1955 season, he joined Norfolk to play Minor Counties cricket with them until 1962, scoring 13 centuries for them in that time. He lived until 2019, dying 5 days after his 97^th birthday.

Ted Witherden, a nudger and nurdler

Bill Murray Wood’s Kent career imploded only a few weeks later. Although an excellent fielder, he was clearly not worth his place in the side as either a batter or a bowler, and, it seems, not as a captain either. He had only been the committee’s second choice to Tony Pawson, anyway, but Pawson had been too busy to take on the role. By the time Canterbury Week came round that August, it was clear that all was not well within the dressing room. Arthur Fagg, as senior professional, had been regularly complaining on the field that the captain never consulted him, but when Murray Wood got the hint from some of his players and began consulting Fagg about tactics more regularly, Fagg complained that it was “just like the committee to appoint a man who knows so little about the game that he has to ask me what to do all the time”. One of the committee subsequently let it be known that the whole team had told the chairman that they would not play again if Murray Wood continued as skipper. So the committee decided on the drastic step of sacking the captain in mid-season and replacing him with Doug Wright, a professional. Lord Harris would have been spinning in his grave.

Murray Wood was asked to resign, but refused, so the club announced his replacement in the middle of the second match of Canterbury Week, against Middlesex. Unfortunately, the story leaked out to the press before Murray Wood had been officially informed of his fate, so he learnt of his sacking while fielding, through the medium of a tactless evening newspaper seller shouting the headlines on the boundary.  Unsurprisingly, Bill Murray Wood never set foot in the St Lawrence ground again. To be fair to the ill-fated captain, the Kent side was very weak, and any leader would have had a difficult time making a game of it against most of the other counties. But he clearly had lost the dressing room, and that Kent appointed a professional to succeed him proved to be one of the county’s first small steps into cricket’s future.

Of the three main protagonists in the Kent v Surrey game of 1953, for Peter Loader his purple patch proved to be just the beginning of a successful career. But for the two Kent men it was perhaps their swan songs, the best they could do in Kent careers that soon collapsed.

THE CRICKET BALLS OF KENT

At the start of the 2024 season, the ECB decided to experiment with two types of cricket ball, Kookaburra and Duke’s, so that English cricketers could get used to the Kookaburra ball which is widely used around the world, as opposed to the Duke’s ball, which is only used in England, Ireland and West Indies. The experiment proved inconclusive, merely reinforcing the fact that good players will be able to cope with all situations, while the less able will struggle. A lot of runs were scored and not many wickets taken, so both Duke’s and Kookaburra balls got smashed regularly to the boundaries of all eighteen counties.

We should never forget the part that the county of Kent has played in the history of cricket ball manufacture. The first commercial enterprise to specialise in making cricket balls was established by a farmer, Timothy Duke, of Penshurst, who is credited with manufacturing the first ‘modern’ cricket ball as long ago as 1760. It seems very unlikely that Duke was able to make a living out of making cricket balls at that time, but it was no doubt a useful sideline to being a farmer. Even then, the game was very much connected with both the aristocracy and gambling, so there was plenty of money in the game, and no doubt the Duke family enjoyed good margins. Their cricket ball business flourished and in 1775 received a royal warrant as manufacturer of cricket balls to the then Prince of Wales, later King George IV, who loved to gamble, and who was often to be seen on the boundary at the great games of the day.

Duke’s continued to grow, and in 1920 was acquired by John Wisden and Co., and subsequently by Gray Nicholls. In 1987, under the name British Cricket Balls Ltd, it was bought by an Indian businessman, Dilip Jajodia. It remains the leading British based manufacturer of cricket balls, although it has long left Penshurst and is now rather more boringly based in Walthamstow.

For many years, Duke’s had a very strong Kentish rival from a tiny village by the Medway. Teston, pronounced Tee-s(t)on, is a small village just south of Maidstone, famed mainly for its Grade 1 listed mediaeval bridge across the River Medway, which dates from the 14^th or 15^th century. In the 2011 census the population of Teston was just 637, but that has not prevented the village from fielding a cricket team, which has played at the big house, Barham Court, since the end of the 19^th century. Over the years they have met with mixed success.

However, the village’s main connection with cricket is not its on-field performances over the years, but Alfred Reader and Co., who for over two centuries have been involved in manufacturing cricket balls. As you travel along the A26 from Maidstone to Tonbridge, turn right just past Barham Court, onto the Malling Road. Within a couple of hundred yards you will pass a building with the words “Alfred Reader and Co. Estd. 1808 Cricket and Hockey Ball Factory” painted in large white letters on its outside. Clearly there is no factory there now, merely those words written on the side of what is now a private dwelling, fronting a small close with a dozen houses, called Readers Court. (As an aside, please feel free to be disgusted by the lack of an apostrophe in ‘Readers’. That stems from grammatical incompetence on behalf of Maidstone Borough Council).

A few hundred yards away, between the village shop and the church, there is a tourist information sign that explains that a certain Thomas Martin made cricket balls in a factory above the village post office from the 1820s. So why do the big white letters say the factory was established in 1808? 1808 was a time when England was preoccupied with the possibility of invasion by Napoleon’s army, and very little organised cricket was played. It seems to have been an even less auspicious time to start making cricket balls than when Duke’s began half a century earlier, and when Duke’s began, they had no local rivals. Indeed, Lord Harris’s seminal History of Kent Cricket contains details of no matches played in the county that year. Why set up a factory making balls for a game very few people were playing? What’s more, the first hockey club in England was not established until about 40 years later, and although there were games similar to what we now call hockey at that time, it seems very unlikely that anybody could make a living from making balls for such an obscure pastime. My guess is that Thomas Martin had previously worked for Duke’s and felt he could do better.

Trade was clearly good enough for Thomas Martin and his family to keep out of the workhouse, and around 1820, he retired from an active role in the factory. He handed it over to Alfred Reader, who, it is said, employed a large percentage of the village population and soon increased production up to 1400 balls a week. By the time that cricket, and to a lesser extent hockey, were flourishing again in the mid-1800s, Reader’s cricket balls were very widely used, and no doubt business was good. There is some doubt about exactly when Mr Reader took over the business, as a newspaper interview with a later generation Alfred Reader in 1939 states that early owners of the business included Fuller Pilch, but certainly by the time organised county cricket was getting under way in the 1860s and 1870s, Reader’s was the name on their cricket balls. 

Throughout the Victorian era, Duke’s and Reader’s flourished as cricket grew rapidly to become the elite national game. Whether the conditions for the workers were particularly pleasant is another matter. The Teston workers formed a trade union in 1919, The Teston Independent Society of Cricket Ball Makers, which was only disbanded in 2006, and which for many years was the smallest trade union in Britain, with fewer than 50 members. In 1962, as cricket balls from Pakistan were undercutting Reader’s prices, the workers threatened to go on strike for an increase in their 4/- (20p) an hour pay, and even Leslie Ames, then Secretary of Kent CCC, was brought into the discussion. He suggested that “the craftsmen are killing the goose that lays the golden egg” by asking for such high wages. From the mid-70s onwards, there are regular stories of commercial difficulties and industrial disputes in the local press. The writing was on the wall.

The Reader’s factory building that still stands in Teston was built in 1927, and until the last couple of decades of the last century, regular advertisements were placed in the newspapers by Reader’s looking to employ young people in their factory. However, in 2000, the factory was closed and Reader’s became part of the Kookaburra empire in 2002. They still have a small presence in Mereworth (pronounced Merry-worth – very few Kent villages are pronounced the way they are spelt), a village about 3 miles to the west of Teston, and the name lives on as a brand. Reader’s balls are still widely used in UK, but no longer made in Kent.

So the two giants of cricket ball manufacture in Kent still exist, and without their skills and manufacturing know-how in the early days of cricket, who knows how the game might have developed?