December seems to be the quietest month of the year for cricket in England, and Kent is, at first glance, no exception. However, over the years, there have been many significant events taking place in this, the darkest of Northern hemisphere months, and I’m not just talking about the repainting of bits of the pavilion, or renewing our subscriptions for 2023.
For example, let’s start at the beginning – December 1st. On that day in 1940, one of our greatest opening batsmen, Mike Denness, was born, in Bellshill in Lanarkshire in Scotland. He went on to play 333 games for the county, winning his Kent cap in 1964, and he captained the county for several of our great glory years, between 1972 and 1976. He also played 28 times for England, 19 times as captain. He scored over 17,000 first-class runs for Kent, and reached 1,000 runs in a season 12 times. A lovely man who went on to become Kent’s president, and he was still in office when he died of cancer in 2013.
One of our younger stars also has reason to remember 1 December. In 1998, Ollie Robinson was born – a very talented wicket-keeper and batsman who sadly felt his future was better served by moving to Durham at the end of last season, a year in which he won his Kent cap. Personally, I think he will flourish at Chester-le-Street and we will soon regret not being able to hold on to him.
On 3 December 1905, probably the greatest batsman-keeper of them all, Leslie Ames, was born. His achievements with Kent and England are legendary and unlikely ever to be surpassed – one hundred centuries, the most by any regular wicket-keeper, 100 victims in a season twice, including over 40 stumpings in a season four times: he and Tich Freeman were a deadly combination. As manager, he built the team which swept all before it in the 1970s and as President of the club he became the first former professional cricketer to hold that post.
5 December marks the birthdays of four very different Kent players. Charles John Macdonald Fox was born in India, where his father was a schoolmaster, in 1858, and played for Kent in 74 matches between 1888 and 1893. A right handed batter and medium pace bowler, he was the 27th to earn a Kent county cap. He scored over 2,000 runs for the county and took 46 wickets, at a bowling average half a run lower than his batting average, qualifying him as a true all-rounder. He died quite young, of a heart attack aged 42 while on a visit to New South Wales.
Hamidullah Qadri was born in Kandahar in Afghanistan on 5 December 2000. A hugely popular member of the Kent squad, his leg spinning arts and aggressive batting are becoming more central to Kent’s attack with every match he plays. With any luck we have well over a decade more of his talents to enjoy.
Two of Kent’s 56 capped women cricketers were born on this day too. Jill Cruwys was born in 1943, and Laura Marsh in 1986. Jill Cruwys, a batter who played for Kent from 1963 and for England from 1969 to 1976, played five Tests and 7 ODIs for her country. She was a member of the England team that won the inaugural World Cup in 1973 but died of breast cancer at the tragically early age of 47 in December 1990. The recently retired Laura Marsh, born in Pembury, played over 100 ODIs for England, alongside nine Tests, from 2006 to 2019. Along the way she was in the team that won the 2009 T20 World Championship, and the 50 Over World Cup against India on that famous day at Lord’s in 2017. She is a spin bowler (though originally a medium-pacer) who bats, and even opened the batting in the final of the 2012 World T20 Final in Colombo, which England narrowly lost to Australia by 4 runs.
Other Kent women players who were born in December include two Kent and England greats, Charlotte Edwards on 17 December 1979, and Mary Pilling on 14 December 1938. Two of Kent’s best recent overseas players, Brendon Nash and Matt Henry, were also born on 14 December, Nash in 1977 and Henry in 1991, and a day later in 1966, Carl Hooper entered the world.
On December 13th, three of Kent’s early greats all made their Test debuts, but in different years. First, in 1897, Jack Mason, the greatest of Kent’s pre-Woolley all-rounders, stepped out onto the field at Sydney to open England’s batting with Archie MacLaren, a game England went on to win by nine wickets. Four years later, also at the SCG, Colin Blythe made his England debut. As had happened four years earlier, MacLaren scored a century, and England won easily, this time by an innings and 124 runs, with Blythe taking 7 for 56 in 29 overs in the match, even outbowling the great Sydney Barnes (6 for 139) and Len Braund (7 for 101).
In 1907, Blythe, Braund and Barnes were all still in England’s XI, and the match was still at the SCG, but this time they were joined by Kenneth Hutchings on debut, and this time Australia sneaked a win by two wickets. The most successful England bowler was another Kent man, Arthur Fielder, who had made his debut for England at Melbourne – not Sydney – on 1 January 1904. Fielder took 9 for 170 in a losing cause.
There’s a lot more we could write about December in Kent, as we haven’t even touched on the career of Colin Cowdrey, born in India on 24th December 1932 and who died on December 4th 2000, or that of the first of our Christmas Day cricketers, Charles Dallas Alexander, born on Christmas Day 1839, also in India. He played one game for Kent in 1862 without distinction, and went on to become a qualified engineer and headmaster of a school in Ewell.
Happy Christmas!
Kent Cricket Heritage Trust 
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