The Picador Book of Cricket

by Ramachandra Guha

  ‘How would he like to marry a rich woman?’

  The intermediary for King raised his eyebrows; here was something new. ‘We have a widow’, went on the county’s intermediary, ‘with £7,000 a year. That would leave him nothing to do but shoot in the winter, and play cricket all the summer.’

  ‘What would the widow say about that?’

  ‘She is very fond of the county,’ was the reply, ‘and a liberal subscriber.’ Liberal indeed! But this offer, like all the others, was declined . . .

  The Philadelphians did not tour England again until 1903, but King’s performances in the intervening years, in the Halifax Cup and against touring sides, were often astonishing. In 1901, for instance, an English team led by Bosanquet played two matches against the Gentlemen of Philadelphia, and King’s figures were 8 for 78, 6 for 57, 6 for 74 and 3 for 28 – 23 wickets in four innings at an average of 10.3. When his swerve was acting right no one could cope with him; but even more important, he was still a great bowler when the conditions were not in his favour.

  It was on their second tour of the English counties that the Philadelphians reached, perhaps, their highest standard as an all-round side. Of their 16 first-class matches they won 7, lost 6, and drew 2 (the other match being abandoned), putting themselves in the category of a good average county side. And in the course of their tour they brought off two really outstanding victories, one against Lancashire and the other against Surrey. Lancashire, it is true, were not at full strength, four of their players being engaged in the Gentlemen v. Players match at Lord’s, but Surrey fielded a strong side . . .

  In first-class matches on the 1903 tour King bowled 451 overs and took 78 wickets at an average of 16.06 each. He also scored 614 runs for a batting average of 29.23. This was in only thirteen first-class matches, and had he played anything like a full season he would certainly have done the double. ‘King is so strong at all points’, wrote one critic, ‘that one would like to see him pitted at single wicket against one of our men such as Hirst or Jackson, or Jessop.’ King in that 1903 season, in a period when both English and Australian cricket were exceptionally strong, had clearly established himself in world class. ‘Is there a greater bowler today?’ asked ‘Short Leg’, of the Wakefield (Yorkshire) Express. ‘I cannot think of him.’

  Having reached such a pinnacle, it was a tragedy that King’s talents should be confined almost entirely to inter-club cricket in Philadelphia in the next five years. In the Halifax Cup, however, he was more dominating than ever. From 1904 to 1908 he won the Batting Cup three times and the Bowling Cup four times, and he twice exceeded 300 in an innings, once in 1905 against Germantown and again in 1906 against Merion. One of his best performances was in the play-off for the Halifax Cup of 1905: Belmont had tied with Merion, and in the play-off Merion won the toss and were dismissed for 56, King taking 6 for 30. King then went in first and hit 18 off the first over and 24 off the first 28, and Belmont won by 9 wickets.

  It was during this period that the greatest of all stories about J. B. King had its origins. It has been told many times, and there are several versions of it, but there seems no doubt, in spite of past scepticism, that it is basically true. Belmont, Bart King’s club, were playing at Elmwood in the Halifax Cup. The Trenton captain missed his train, and when he arrived on the ground about an hour late he found that in his absence his side had won the toss and batted and were doing badly; by the time he had changed and got ready to bat, nine of the side were out and he was obliged to bat No. 11.

  On his way to the wicket the Trenton captain apologized to the Belmont captain for being so unpunctual, adding somewhat unwisely that his team wouldn’t have been in such a mess if he hadn’t missed his train. This remark was overheard by King, whose sense of showmanship and the absurd was stimulated. King enjoyed nothing more than the comedy which deflates; a boast like that made by the Trenton captain called for a bathetic pay-off.

  It was a popular stunt of a famous baseball pitcher of the day, Rube Waddell, to send all his catchers off the field as an act of showmanship towards the end of a game and to dismiss the striker without their help. The idea appealed to King, and as the Trenton captain took guard King called his fielders together and sent them to the pavilion. They needed some persuading at first, but such was King’s personality and renown that they finally did as they were asked.

  The Trenton captain watched all this uneasily; King must have something up his sleeve. King walked back to begin his run, but as he turned he saw that the wicketkeeper was still in his place.

  ‘Why, Eddie,’ he called, ‘whatever are you doing there? I won’t need you either, Eddie. You’d better join the others.’

  The wicketkeeper left the field, leaving just the two batsmen, the two umpires, and Bart King. The Trenton captain was meanwhile torn between many emotions. King was clearly trying to make a fool of him, but at the same time he must surely have a unique opportunity of scoring in every sense off King. Fear of being made to look silly, however, was the dominant emotion, and he decided to protest to the umpires. Cricket was a game for two sides of eleven men; King’s action was outside the laws and ought not to be allowed.

  After going into a huddle, the umpires, with some prompting from King, decided that, while the law demanded that the fielding side should consist of not more than eleven men, there was nothing to prevent King from dispensing with his entire field if he wished. The Trenton captain was thus obliged to meet King’s challenge.

  King went back to his mark again, but this time he paused. His sense of occasion demanded some further gesture, and he called to the pavilion that he would want one fieldsman. A fieldsman duly appeared, and King proceeded to place him with elaborate care, twenty yards behind the wicket and four paces to leg.

  This pantomime of field-placing puzzled the Trenton captain so much that he rose to the bait. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he demanded, ‘you said you didn’t want a wicketkeeper, but what do you want him for?’

  ‘He’s not a wicketkeeper,’ said King. ‘He’s not even a fielder.’

  ‘What is he, then?’

  ‘I’ve given the umpires enough trouble already,’ said King. ‘He’s there to pick up the bails.’

  King, so the story goes, then ran up and hit the stumps with a fast ‘angler’. The fieldsman bent down and gathered up the bails, which had fallen at his feet, and handed them courteously to the umpire, and the Trenton innings was over.

  Other versions of the story have it that the fieldsman was placed at fine leg to pick up the ball, and that he duly did so. Efforts in later years to get confirmation of the story from surviving Belmont players, however, have met a tight-lipped loyalty. ‘You heard what Bart said, didn’t you?’ was all the answer one could get. However, there is another version, one that King himself would have enjoyed. It was related many years later by the man who, if his story can be believed, was the Trenton captain on that day.

  ‘When I went in to bat that afternoon,’ said the Trenton captain, ‘King had four balls left in his over. I hit his first delivery to cover point but of course there was no one there. The ball stopped within three feet of the boundary, and King had to chase it. By the time he got back we had run six.

  ‘I drove the fourth ball of the over past mid-on and this time it stopped only inches from the boundary, and again we ran six. The same thing happened next ball, and by this time King’s tongue was hanging out and I began to feel sorry for him. Besides, my partner was getting tired too. When King lobbed up his last ball – he was too exhausted now to bowl fast – I took pity on him and lifted it over the pavilion. That was 24 runs in four balls. I think I must be the only player ever to hit four successive sixes off Bart King.

  ‘I would be the first to admit, though,’ went on the man who claimed to have been the Trenton captain, ‘that King was a great bowler, but I think he would have to take second place to me in one respect.’

  ‘You mean as a batsman?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. He was a muc
h better bat than I was.’ The man edged a bit closer. ‘You see, the fact is, I happen to be the world’s champion liar.’

  The inference was that Bart King himself was pretty good at telling the tale.

  ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

  Although it was an Englishman, B. J. T. Bosanquet, who first invented the googly, it has since been Australians who have been its foremost practitioners. The three great googly bowlers between the wars were A. A. Mailey, C. V. Grimmett and W. J. O’Reilly. Sadly, space only permits the inclusion of this piece on Mailey (the other two do, however, make cameo appearances elsewhere in the book).

  Neville Cardus’s essay on his friend has some good stories, though one has been left out. This concerns an argument between Mailey and Cardus that took place some fifteen years after the (for England) disastrous series of 1921. At a posh club in London, the critic was telling the practitioner that he could ‘read’ him, even if the English batsmen of long ago could not. A bystander then procured a tennis ball, and the disputants (both in dinner jackets) left the party for the nearby Piccadilly Circus, a few fans following behind. At the roundabout Cardus took up his position as wicketkeeper, while Mailey began to bowl. The ball was tossed up, and the keeper, expecting a leg break, moved over smartly to the off. But it was the wrong-un, as cleverly disguised as ever, and Cardus was left stranded as the ball went gambolling the other way, down in the direction of Leicester Square.

  NEVILLE CARDUS

  The Millionaire of Spin (1970)

  The most fascinating cricketer I have known was the Australian Arthur Mailey, an artist in every part of his nature. On the field of play, he bowled leg spin, with the ‘googly’. A man of his gift for fantasy could never have contented himself with ‘seaming’ a new ball. Mailey would tell me how much he revelled in the ‘feel’ of a ball spinning from his fingers. ‘I’d rather spin and see the ball hit for four than bowl a batsman out by a straight one.’ Such a view or attitude was not exactly attuned to the main idea (the only idea nowadays) obsessing a cricketer: the lust for victory, the fear of defeat. Yet Mailey could win a match devastatingly, spinning the greatest batsmen to immobile helplessness. Once he bowled Gloucestershire out single-fingered, or rather, with three fingers and a thumb. He took all ten wickets in a Gloucestershire innings for 66. Then, later, when he wrote his autobiography, he called the book 10 for 66, and All That.

  His life as a boy was not unlike my own, born in a semi-slum, the so-called Surry ‘hills’, a Sydney excretion, eighty years ago. He was ‘dragged up’, and worked as a labourer, a plumber’s mate, at any casual job. All the time he educated himself, learned not only the most difficult sort of bowling; also he cultivated a talent to paint pictures and draw cartoons. He became, at the height of his career as cricketer, a well-liked cartoonist in Sydney newspapers. He sketched in the manner of the 1890s, broad and unsubtle, yet humorous. He painted landscape canvases, with trees and skies recognizably green, brown or blue. In London, he had a private exhibition of his paintings. Queen Mary did him the honour of inspecting these landscapes. She was graciously approving, on the whole; but she paused in front of one canvas, saying; ‘I don’t think, Mr Mailey, you have painted the sun quite convincingly in this picture.’ ‘Perhaps not, Your Majesty,’ replied Arthur, ‘you see, Your Majesty, in this country I have to paint the sun from memory.’

  ‘If ever I bowl a maiden over,’ he assured me, ‘it’s not my fault, but the batsman’s.’ He enjoyed himself; he explored himself; he was whimsical. One Saturday in Sydney I saw him on the ferry boat going to Neutral Bay, a mile or two’s journey – it couldn’t be called a voyage. We chatted and parted at our suburban destination. A few days later, I read in a newspaper that he had arrived in London – in wartime. Not a word had he spoken, as we journeyed that Saturday afternoon to Neutral Bay, of his flight to London. I would run into him at Lord’s, not during a tour of an Australian team here, run into him and cry out in surprise, ‘Good Lord, Arthur, what are you doing in London? When did you come?’ ‘Oh,’ he would say, ‘I’ve just dropped in from Hong Kong – via Neutral Bay.’ He was slender of physical build, well-shouldered; his face good-looking, with a touch of Aboriginal, was wrinkled with incipient fun. He never laughed loudly; he smiled, as the play of his whimsical mind tickled his nerve of risibility. He was one of the New South Wales bowlers pitted against Victoria at Melbourne, in the Australian summer of 1926–27, in the match in which Victoria amassed 1,107 runs in a single innings. Mailey contrived to take 4 wickets for round about 350 runs; but, he maintained to his life’s end, the scorer’s analysis on the occasion did him less than justice, because three catches were missed off his bowling – ‘two by a man in the pavilion, wearing a bowler hat’.

  He tossed up his spin to the batsman slow and alluringly; never have I seen on a cricket field such undisguised temptation as was presented to the batsman by Mailey’s bowling. It was almost immoral. He once clean bowled the incomparable Hobbs with a slow full toss, also at Melbourne, after the Master and Herbert Sutcliffe had scored 283 together, undefeated, on the third day of the second Test match of the 1924–25 rubber. First ball next day Hobbs missed Mailey’s full ‘floater’. Mailey needed to double-up his body to express the humour of it. If a catch was dropped from his bowling, he seldom complained; he would go to the unhappy fieldsman and say: ‘I’m expecting to take a wicket any day now.’ No bowler has spun a ball with more than Mailey’s twist, fingers and right forearm and leverage. He lacked the accuracy of, say, Grimmett, another Australian leg-spinner; but Mailey bowled his spin with the lavishness of a millionaire. Grimmett bowled it like a miser – as Ray Robinson, Australia’s wittiest cricket writer, once put it, or suggested the simile, to me.

  At the end of March 1948, I was one of the company of Bradman’s Australian team sailing by Orient line to England, Bradman’s last summer in England as cricketer. His team was indeed powerful, for in it were two great fast bowlers, Lindwall and Miller, with Johnston in support. The batsmen collaborating with Bradman included Morris, Barnes, Hassett, Harvey, Brown, Miller and Loxton. During the voyage, one evening after dinner, Bradman sat talking to a number of his players. One of them said, in an excess of pride that he was one of the chosen few, ‘You’ve got a great side for this trip, Don. I doubt if Victor Trumper could have got a place in it.’ The Don contemplated this remark for a few seconds. ‘I don’t agree,’ he said quietly, ‘no, I don’t agree. Victor could have got in it all right.’ ‘But,’ persisted the proud one, ‘who could you drop out of this present team for Trumper?’ Like a flash Bradman replied, ‘You – to begin with.’ Memorable and ruthless.

  Arthur Mailey had now, of course, retired from active service on the field, but he was with us on the way to England in that spring of 1948. We sat at the same dining table throughout the five weeks’ voyage from Sydney to Southampton. With us, each evening, was a lovely auburn-haired Sydney girl, who had ambitions as a ballet dancer. Under the sky of the Pacific and Indian Oceans she would dance for Arthur and myself, at midnight, on the high ‘D’ deck; I can see her yet, luminous in the moonlight and, apparently, as immaterial. Arthur and I both fell for her. Always the three of us took coffee together after dinner. At Colombo, a young judge came aboard. And the girl left us to dance with him, ‘just one dance’, she explained. But she did not return; she danced with this young judge persistently. We waited. At last I said to Mailey: ‘Arthur, let’s go to bed. We’ll teach her a lesson. She’ll come back here for a drink, and find we’ve gone. Come.’ Arthur agreed. So we departed to our own cabins, which adjoined. I waited till I heard Arthur’s electric light click. I listened. Not a sound. After a while, giving him time really to get off to sleep, I crept up to the dancing deck. I stealthily tiptoed, watching the dancers through the window. Soon, surely, the dancing would come to an end. Then I would . . . I saw her, still with the judge. Still, soon I would . . . I turned the corner of the dance hall, in the outside dark. And I collided with Arthur. He, too, had imagined he had heard my electric li
ght click and thought I was safely asleep. He was the kind of blithe spirit that causes comical things like this to happen.

  He took to cricket in the manner of nearly every Australian boy in his period of penniless nonage, playing with a kerosene tin for the wicket. At once he discovered that he could, with the sensitive education of his fingers, persuade a cricket ball to go through a kaleidoscope of changing curving flight and capricious gyrations from the earth; he could by spin and flight express his own mazeful mind. He was a romantic in the sense which is regarded as completely outmoded these days, a time of history described by Sir Thomas Beecham as ‘the most barbaric since Attila’ – and that is going back somewhat. Mailey when young was staggered one Saturday, in his head and his heart, to learn that he had been chosen to play in the First XI of his district ‘grade’ contingent. (In Australia every suburban community has two or three cricket teams.) Moreover, young Arthur would, this very Saturday, be playing against Victor Trumper’s side. And Victor then was in his prime, the idol worshipped by all Australian boys – and by English boys, myself included – the most chivalrous batsman of all time, the most gallant, versatile and youthful. His grave, in a churchyard outside Sydney, is to this day covered by fresh flowers. Young Mailey spent this Saturday morning, preceding the afternoon of his personal contact with Apollo, in an utter misery of anxiety. No; he wasn’t worrying about his own likelihood or unlikelihood of performing ably in his baptism into top-class Sydney cricket, first rung on the ladder to Test matches. His concern was all for Victor – was he well, not afflicted by a chill? Would he get run over in the streets by a cab? People, sixty or so years ago, did somehow get run over by four-wheeled cabs, so Arthur’s fears could be justified, considering the way God had made him, responsive to any romantic suggestion. Victor survived the morning’s dangers; he did not cut himself dangerously while shaving, did not scald his hand with hot water, did not get run over in the streets. He played for his eleven v. the eleven containing the tyro Mailey. And Mailey couldn’t believe it when his captain asked him to bowl at Victor! Arthur did bowl at the Incomparable. Victor enchanted Arthur by some strokes from his bowling which, Arthur remembered years after, were like strokes made by a bat of conjuration. Then, incredibly, Arthur clean bowled Victor. And, wrote Mailey, in his autobiography: ‘I was ashamed. It was as though I had killed a dove.’ Language to bring a blush to the cheeks of the latest of cricket’s sophistical fellow workers.