The Astonishing Debuts of Harold Gimblett

Harold Gimblett in 1936 (Image: Wikipedia)

It was the absolute exemplar of a fairy tale debut. Harold Gimblett was a man coming to the end of an unsuccessful two-week trial, in whom his captain had no faith, when he was picked to play for Somerset against Essex in May 1935. He played largely because no-one else was available and the publishers of the printed scorecards available at all games at this time did not even know his initials. He came to the wicket at number eight, when the scorecard read 106 for six. Just over an hour later, he reached one of the most spectacular debut centuries in the history of first-class cricket. Perhaps inevitably, the rest of Gimblett’s playing career, as successful as it undoubtedly was (and Foot, in 1982, called Gimblett the “greatest batsman Somerset have ever produced”), never quite lived up to that debut; sport is full of similar stories of spectacular beginnings that peter out. But in Gimblett’s case, the reasons are far from typical and the course of his cricketing life provides one of the earliest-documented cases of the devastating effect that cricket can have on mental health.

Gimblett’s story was once well-known, and was told astonishingly well by David Foot in his 1982 biography Harold Gimblett: Tormented Genius of Cricket. The book was enormously influential and became the standard work on Gimblett. The main reason for this — other than some excellent, and unusually restrained, writing from Foot — was that it was based on extensive tape recordings made by Gimblett before his death in 1978, which were intended to form the basis of a book which he hoped to write about his life with Foot’s help. Searingly and painfully honest, and never sanitised or polished for his final audience, Gimblett’s words — frequently given in full by Foot — give an almost unique insight into the thoughts of a professional cricketer in the 1930s. Of course, the usual caveats apply, not least that Gimblett was discussing events from forty years previously and his recollections were doubtless skewed by his mental health struggles during his playing days. But even so, it is a unique book and no biography/autobiography about a pre-war cricketer really compares to it for its honesty. As John Arlott wrote in his foreword, “There has never been a cricket book quite like this”.

However, the format has become more familiar since Tormented Genius was published; many recent cricketers have opened up about their own struggles after another Somerset opener, Marcus Trescothick, wrote Coming Back to Me (2008), an autobiography described by Gideon Haigh as “seminal”, about the mental health problems that ended his own career. Even before that, Ken Barrington wrote a little-remembered book called Playing It Straight (1968) which revealed his own problems with mental health that prompted him to take a break from the game in 1966 because he felt “on the brink of a nervous breakdown”. But Barrington was clearly uncomfortable discussing such matters in print: apologetic, even defensive, and concerned with what his audience might think. Modern autobiographies suffer from similar guardedness, a sense of “what will they think?” But Gimblett largely speaking for Foot, not for the reading public, so that caution is replaced with complete honesty. Even if we cannot be certain that everything he said was factually accurate — or even, at times, fair — we are reading Gimblett’s unvarnished thoughts and opinions.

Our starting point really should be that amazing first-class debut, but this requires a little background. Harold Gimblett was born in 1914 at Blakes’ Farm, Bicknoller, Somerset. He was the youngest son of Percy and Louise Gimblett. His father was a farmer, making his family relatively prosperous; he and his two older brothers attended West Buckland school in North Devon. He quickly made his name as a cricketer, and was part of the school’s First Eleven by the age of 13. In one early game, he recalled the thrill of facing the opposition’s “demon” fast bowler when batting at number nine. His batting won the game and he later recalled it as one of his proudest achievements. He was always adventurous with the bat; he remembered hitting his first ball in an organised game of cricket for six; playing for West Buckland Second Eleven at the age of twelve, he once ran seven after hitting the ball into a patch of nettles but was out trying to improvise another shot into the same nettles. But he was highly effective at school level; Foot described him as “occasionally reckless, usually dominant”. Yet off the field, he struggled with homesickness and struggled to mix with his fellow pupils. He was reluctantly appointed the team captain at the age of fifteen; worried by the prospect of leading older boys, he initially tried to back out of the appointment.

Leaving school in 1931, he initially went to London to work in the grocery trade but soon returned to Somerset and worked on the family farm. He played plenty of club cricket, usually successfully, and rattled up several big scores. Playing for the Somerset Stragglers in 1932, he scored 142 in 75 mins against Wellington School from number six, his first ever century. The following season, he scored 150 in 80 minutes against the Stragglers, playing for Watchet. He played an increasing amount of cricket for Watchet, batting in a very carefree style that meant he would alter his approach — shutting up shop and defending, or throwing away his wicket — on a whim. But the number of runs he scored attracted attention from the press.

A local tailor called W. G. Penny thought that Gimblett was good enough to play for Somerset and encouraged him in this direction despite a palpable lack of enthusiasm from the man himself. He had to be cajoled into playing in the annual match between a Somerset XI and a team selected by Penny, but he made an impression in one such match by striking the former England bowler and ex-Somerset captain Jack White for three sixes. Somerset thought he was too risky a player, or not quite good enough. But Penny persisted and Gimblett was offered two-week trial as a professional in May 1935. As was typical in the Somerset team in this period, he was simply shown his place in the changing room and told to keep to himself. He did not excel in the nets and was told he was not good enough; the Somerset secretary John Daniell told him he would be paid for the first week and then let go. Gimblett latter claimed that had enjoyed the experience, but wasn’t too disappointed (although Foot believed that the actual event was more fraught and argumentative than Gimblett recalled in the 1970s). He performed some twelfth-man duties in one match, although he did not travel with the team to an away game.

But a late injury to Laurie Hawkins before Somerset played Essex at Frome on 18 May meant that a replacement could not be secured at short notice and so Gimblett was asked to play. The ground was in a somewhat rural location, making it hard for Gimblett to reach. He arranged a lift with a team-mate but missed his bus and had to hitch to the agreed rendezvous. When he arrived at the ground, he was very nervous; when he was advised that the Essex bowler Peter Smith would bowl him a googly early in his innings, he did not know what a googly was because he had never seen one. Or so he later claimed. Somerset won the toss, batted and crumbled to 106 for six shortly after lunch. The damage had been done by the pace bowling of Maurice Nichols. Gimblett came in, using the spare bat of Arthur Wellard (his own had looked dirty enough that Wellard suggested that he borrow his), who was already in the middle. Smith bowled him a googly third ball, but he took a single without reading it; the next over, he hit Smith for fifteen runs, including a six over mid-off.

Arthur Wellard (left) and Gimblett walking to the wicket in August 1935 (Image: Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, 9 August 1935)

And with that, Gimblett began to score quickly. He and Wellard added 69 in nine overs, of which Wellard hit 48. He brought up his fifty with a six (28 minutes, 33 deliveries) and even after two quick wickets fell, Gimblett continued to hit, driving, sweeping and hooking. Assisted by a short boundary, his score mounted rapidly; a hook for four off Nichols was followed by a two. Although the primitive scoreboard did not include the individual scores of batters, spectators told him that he had reached an almost unbelievable century. It had taken 63 minutes and come out of 130 runs scored; it was the fastest century of the season, for which Gimblett was awarded the Walter Lawrence Trophy in September. He was eventually dismissed for 123 (79 minutes, 17 fours, 3 sixes); Somerset reached a total of 337 and, on the third day, won by an innings.

Although many batters had previously scored a century on their first-class debut — The Cricketer suggested that 22 men had done so in county cricket since 1868 — few had done so in such spectacular fashion; The Cricketer noted that the circumstances in which Gimblett batted, and the pace at which he scored, meant that he had “surely outdone all previous century debutants”. Inevitably, the press were enthralled and suddenly began to pay a huge amount of attention to Gimblett. His emergence from no-where, and his family background were a gift to newspapers. The Daily Mirror, for example, reported his debut under the headline “Farm Boy Surprises Cricket!” It also featured a photograph of Gimblett at work on his father’s farm on the first page of the newspaper.

Jack Hobbs, one of the press by then, wrote that an innings such as that played by Gimblett brought enormous pressure. And it quickly took its toll. In his next match, played at Lord’s, Gimblett scored fifty in the second innings, but had to use a runner and missed a month of cricket; and there were few runs after that. He struggled to mix with the other professionals and disliked the snobbery he saw in the game; he particularly disliked many of the amateur players. Although his trial was extended and he played regularly for the rest of the season, he scored just one more fifty and his final record — 482 first-class runs at an average of 17.21 — was quite a come-down from the fairy-tale of his debut. Wisden acknowledged his loss of form, and concluded: “Almost entirely a forward player, he appeared to pay little heed to defence, and in the end lack of experience contributed to his undoing. Still, shrewd observers maintain that he possesses distinct possibilities, and with further opportunities he may become more than a useful member of the side.”

Gimblett photographed working on his father’s farm a few days after his first-class debut (Image: Daily Mirror, 20 May 1935)

Despite his collapse in form in 1935, Gimblett had done enough to persuade the committee that he had a future at Somerset, and he signed a professional contract at the end of the season (which was worth £300 if he appeared in every match). But even if he had been uncertain whether he wanted to pursue career in cricket, his hand was somewhat forced by the death of his father, shortly before the 1936 season. His family took over the running of the farm, but the financial pressure was eased considerably if Gimblett could be “cut loose” by supporting himself through his new cricket career. Although he was a regular in the Somerset team until after the Second World War, it was not always a smooth road.

Looking back forty years later, Gimblett — without saying so explicitly — clearly identified signs in 1936 that all was not well. He began the season in spectacular form. He was promoted to open the batting — a position he held for the rest of his career — and in the opening game of the season, when Somerset played the touring Indian team, he scored a century. In the following game, he hit 93 and 160 not out against Lancashire; in the next, he scored a century before lunch on the second morning (after the first day had been washed out) against Northamptonshire, when he hit six sixes and nine fours. This rich vein of form catapulted him back into the newspapers and made him famous all over again. Almost inevitably, he came into contention for a place in the England team for the Test series against India. After a poor run of results, the Test selectors wanted to freshen up the team and replace some veterans; after his famous debut and such a good start to the season, Gimblett seemed the ideal candidate. And when the selectors went to watch him, they saw his century before lunch at Northamptonshire.

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Gimblett batting during his excellent start to the 1936 season

In the tapes he recorded for David Foot, Gimblett remembered listening to the announcement of the Test side on the radio, but there was no excitement or anticipation: “I prayed that I wouldn’t be included. Far from throwing my hat in the air, I was terrified. Suddenly I realised the fearful responsibilities resting on my shoulders. The telephone started ringing, cars arrived, the usual nonsense. I just wanted to go away and get lost. I didn’t want to play for England.” Nor did it get any easier when he arrived at Lord’s, where the first test was to be played. He never liked Lord’s throughout his career, feeling it to be a place of prejudice and snobbery. When he looked outside before the match began, he was overwhelmed by the sight of 30,000 spectators waiting for the start of play; he had to be reassured and distracted by his teammates, the Yorkshire players Hedley Verity and Maurice Leyland.

Gimblett’s experience of being selected bears quite a few similarities to the experiences of modern players who faced mental health problems during their careers. In a 2020 interview, Jonathan Trott described what happened before one Test in 2013: “I knew I was in a little bit of trouble, not wanting to play. That’s when the whole anxiety of putting the tracksuit on and going to the ground was triggered.” Trott in particular struggled with the scrutiny of playing at the top level by the end of his career. This sounds very similar to the experiences described by Gimblett. In the same feature, Marcus Trescothick described what happened to him in 2006: “I had no idea what was going on at that point. I had all these feelings and emotions — not sleeping, not eating, not really being able to enjoy life or cope with what was going on. That was when it went completely pear-shaped. I knew then I was in a world of trouble. I didn’t know how to cope with or understand it. It was anxiety more than anything — I have always suffered more with anxiety than depression. There was a constant feeling of alertness, adrenaline, being worried about what was going on and how I was feeling. A panic.” And the footballer Michael Carrick spoke about not wanting to be picked for England after his experiences in 2010: “I was depressed at times, yes. I told the FA, ‘Look, please don’t pick me’.”

But in 1936, there was far less understanding than there might be today. Although Verity and Leyland might have sensed something, and tried to take care of Gimblett, the authorities would prove less understanding. But in the short term, it looked as if Gimblett had made a great success of his debut. In a low-scoring, rain-affected game, batters on both teams struggled. Gimblett scored 11 in the first innings, finding it hard to cope with the swing bowling of Amar Singh, who took six for 35. India actually took a narrow first-innings lead, but when they were bowled out for 93 early on the third and final morning, England needed 107 to win, which could have been tricky. Gimblett had spoken to Jack Hobbs after his first innings and received some technical tips, and the results were immediate. Having lost his opening partner, Arthur Mitchell, without a run on the board, Gimblett hit an unbeaten 67 in 100 minutes, the highest score of the game and one of only two fifties, including four successive fours from the pace-bowling of Mohammad Nissar. He had made a shaky start; but Wisden recorded: “As Gimblett got the pace of the wicket, however, he developed sound hitting powers and hooked superbly … The conditions during the last innings certainly favoured the batting side but Gimblett, who hit eleven 4s, played with much skill and nerve on his debut in Test cricket.” England won by nine wickets and Gimblett was once again the successful debutant. The Times called it “a glorious innings” and suggested he was a certain selection for the rest of the summer and beyond.

But Gimblett played just one more Test that summer, and only two more in the remainder of his career. While part of the reason was doubtless because his attacking style and refusal to play with more restraint concerned the England selectors, Gimblett’s story is far more complicated than that. In later years, many of his team-mates believed, he actively tried to prevent his own selection. And despite a very successful career that lasted until 1954, Gimblett never quite lived up to either his first-class or his Test debut. His cricket, like his life away from the sport, became a battle that he eventually lost…

“The Human Catapult Who Wrecks the Roofs of Distant Towns”: The Impact of Gilbert Jessop

Gilbert Laird Jessop by Albert Chevallier Tayler, after a photograph by George William Beldam
lithograph, 1905; 14 3/4 in. x 9 3/4 in. (375 mm x 248 mm); Purchased, 1987
Primary Collection NPG 5958
© National Portrait Gallery, London

Although far less revered than he once was — for example forty years ago, Ian Botham was often compared to him — Gilbert Jessop’s name has remained known largely thanks to his century at the Oval in 1902 that is still the fastest scored by an English Test batter. And countless times it has been suggested that he would have been ideally suited to modern cricket: during times when cricket was played in dour, defensive fashion, there were frequent assertions that another Jessop would have broken the shackles; when first one-day and then T20 cricket became increasingly important, those of a historical disposition were quick to point out that Jessop had been playing that kind of cricket long before it was fashionable and would doubtless have excelled in the more frenetic formats. While this kind of speculation is always interesting, it can never be definitively settled and anyone trying to prove or disprove that Jessop would have been a success had he played in 2023 is deluding themself. However, owing to Jessop’s fame and the impact he had on cricket during his career, we know an enormous amount about how he played the game.

A short summary makes it clear that Jessop would in many ways have been an ideal T20 cricketer. Aside from his batting feats, ludicrously fast scoring and ability to hit the ball to (and over) the boundary, he was an outstanding fielder and a serviceable fast bowler in his younger days. It is easy to imagine IPL franchises being desperate to secure his services. Yet he was the product of a different age: a schoolteacher turned stockbroker whose ambition to enter the Church of England was foiled by his lack of schooling. And he was an amateur who would never have countenanced professional sport; while happy enough to play alongside professionals, he had no desire to become one. Like most of his amateur contemporaries, he would have been appalled by the modern cricket world.

But in many ways, Jessop was ahead of his time in a cricketing sense; there had been hitters before him but none who even remotely approached his level of success. For example George Bonnor of Australia averaged 21 in first-class cricket and Charles Thornton averaged 19; Jessop’s average was just short of 33, which was more than acceptable for any batter in that period. Not that he would have cared, as he once wrote that “statisticians are anathema to me”. For all the risks that he took, he was extremely successful: to achieve an average over forty in an English season, as he did four times between 1900 and 1911, was extremely difficult and the mark of a quality batter. And if his style meant that he inevitably endured fallow periods (and throughout his career, his spectacular innings were often followed by a run of poor scores), when in form he could be extremely consistent. For example, he scored nine fifties in 15 innings in 1900.

Gilbert Laird Jessop (‘Men of the Day. No. 816.’) by Sir Leslie Ward
chromolithograph, published in Vanity Fair 25 July 1901
14 1/8 in. x 9 1/2 in. (359 mm x 242 mm) paper size
Reference Collection; NPG D45076
© National Portrait Gallery, London

No other top players in this period batted like Jessop; lesser cricketers, such as Ted Alletson, might achieve a one-off success through slogging, but few built a career on big hitting and none as successfully as Jessop. Even relatively fast scoring batters from later periods such as Jack Hobbs, Donald Bradman or Viv Richards — all of whom were undeniably superior to Jessop — never approached Jessop’s scoring rate, although unlike him they were capable of batting in more than one way. It has only been over the last twenty years that it has become customary for Test and first-class batters consistently to score quickly as the default tactical choice. However, even if comparisons across history could ever be meaningful, we do not have enough data to make reliably comparisons between Jessop and modern batters. All we can do is to examine how he played.

Gerald Brodribb, in The Croucher: A Biography of Gilbert Jessop (1974), looked in great detail at the statistics available for Jessop’s career. According to Brodribb: “His fifty-three centuries were scored at an average rate of 82.7 runs an hour, while his 127 scores of 50 to 99 were made at an average rate of 76.32 runs an hour. Together his 180 scores of 50 or more were scored at an average rate of 79.08 runs an hour.” His fastest fifty took just 15 minutes (something he achieved in 1904 aginst Somerset and in 1907 against Hampshire) and is fastest century came in 40 minutes against Yorkshire in 1897 (he scored a a 42-minute century for the Gentlemen of the South against the Players of the South in 1907). Fifteen of his first-class hundreds were scored in under an hour. And in 1903, he scored 200 in two hours against Sussex (and in 1905 he managed 200 in 130 minutes against Somerset). He rarely batted for a long time. In first-class cricket, he batted 855 times but according to Brodribb: “Only once did he bat for more than three hours, only ten times for more than two hours, and only thirty-five times in all did he bat for more than 90 minutes.”

Gilbert Jessop batting (Image: Wikipedia)

He often dominated the scoring while he was at the wicket: for example, in 1901 he scored 66 out of the 66 runs added to the team score while he was batting against Sussex; in 1895, he scored 63 out of 65 against Yorkshire; in 1900, he scored 109 out of 120 against Middlesex; in 1908, he scored 75 out of 80 in the first innings against Nottinghamshire and then 78 out of 86 in the second. But such records rapidly become meaningless so often did Jessop dominate: 92 out of 106 (v Sussex in 1903); 110 out of 122 (during his 126 against Worcestershire in 1902); 171 out of 206 (for Cambridge against Yorkshire in 1899); 191 out of 234 (for the Gentlemen of the South against the Players of the South in 1907); or his highest score of all, 286 scored out of 355 against Sussex in 1903. Brodribb calculated that he made around 72 per cent of the runs scored by his team during his centuries.

For a modern audience, the only measurement of significance is the batting “strike rate” — the number of runs scored per 100 balls in an innings. The number of deliveries that Jessop faced is only known for a handful of larger innings as it was not customary to report this statistic until long after the Second World War; any evaluation of scoring rate was instead based on time at the wicket. Yet something about Jessop inspired journalists and spectators sometimes to keep track of how many deliveries he had received — something rarely done for any other player until the 1920s and 1930s. Brodribb recorded the most notable of Jessop’s innings for which we know how many balls he faced:

Runs	Deliveries	Match	Strike Rate
61	24	Gloucestershire v Somerset, Bristol 1904	254
72	29	Gloucestershire v Warwickshire, Cheltenham 1908	249
54	22	Gloucestershire v Hampshire, Cheltenham 1913	245
116	57	Lord Londesborough’s XI v Kent, Scarborough 1913	203
66	36	Gloucestershire v Somerset, Bath 1906	183
66	37	Gloucestershire v Sussex, Bristol 1901	179
85	52	Gloucestershire v Essex, Bristol 1907	163
92	64	Gloucestershire v Hampshire, Cheltenham 1907	144
		Test Matches
93	69	England v South Africa, Lord’s 1907	134
102	79	England v Australia, The Oval 1902	130

Figures collated by Gerald Brodribb; their origin in usually uncertain and might not always include the delivery from which Jessop was dismissed.

Perhaps some of these innings were scored against weaker counties on smaller grounds; but until 1910, a ball had to be struck out of the ground, not just over the boundary, to be awarded six runs. A hit into the crowd — worth six today — only counted as four. Under modern rules, some of Jessop’s innings would have been quicker and larger.

Such was Jessop’s fame that his career record attracted a great deal of analysis, most notably by Gerald Brodribb. Just a couple more points will suffice. During his first-class centuries, he reached three figures in an average time of 72 minutes and scored at an average rate of 82.7 runs per hour. The only batters from before the Second World War who matched or surpassed this rate in longer innings were out-and-out hitters — such as Jim Smith or Charles Thornton — whose average was considerably lower than Jessop. By Brodribb’s calculation, the “average” rate in cricket in this period was around 30 runs per hour; he worked out that of the leading batters who played before the Second World War, Frank Woolley and Victor Trumper averaged around 55 runs per hour; Charlie Macartney and Ranjitsinhji managed around 50 runs per hour; Donald Bradman, Archie MacLaren, Denis Compton between 45 and 50. While such statistics must be treated with caution — it is unclear how Brodribb reached these figures and slower (and smaller) innings would probably have been excluded from his calculations — they give an indication of how Jessop scored atypically quickly for the period in which he played.

Perhaps more importantly was the perception that he scored quickly. Whenever he came out to bat, a ripple of excitement passed through the crowd. After his 93 against South Africa in 1907, one journalist spoke to the spectators: “‘I’d give up a day’s work to see Jessop,’ said a man with a dented bowler hat. ‘That’s what I call cricket!'” An innings by Jessop was guaranteed entertainment; he often aimed his shots at the largest buildings. His fame drew crowds of spectators and attracted headline writers and advertisers. One story might best illustrate this. Shortly after he had scored a double century for Gloucestershire, he appeared for a team representing the Daily Mail in a match against a club in Sutton. His first ball was bowled by a “gardener’s boy” who — according to Brodribb — bowled him with a shooter. The boy “yelled out a delighted ‘Hurrah!’ as he saw how he had got rid of the great man … and he proceeded to do a series of cartwheels all around the ground until such unseemliness was put an end to.” And everyone knew that the crowds came to see Jessop. On the last day of a match at the Hastings Festival in 1899, Jessop came down the pitch to a lob from Digby Jephson and missed, to be stumped. But the umpire Bob Thoms gave him not out, saying: “‘Not out … not out — sixpenny crowd — Saturday gate — can’t disappoint ’em — near thing — near thing — but not near enough for the occasion.” Jessop went on to score 68-minute century as the game rifted to a draw.

How was Jessop able to score so consistently quickly? He adopted his batting stance early in his career so that he was bent low over the bat in order to allow him to run down the pitch faster (adapting the idea from when he ran in sprint races). As a result, he was given the nickname “The Croucher”. He crouched so low that in 1904, he was given out lbw when hit on the head by the ball. But Jessop wrote in 1921: “I have had small reason to regret taking up a stance which a writer once graphically described as a position whereby the aroma of the pitch could be sampled to the best advantage.” At the same time, he also adopted an unusually low grip on the bat to allow him to switch his stroke at the last moment if the bowler saw him advancing and altered his length. His success was based on his strength, quickness of hands and feet, and depended on watching the ball very closely. Although he told his son never to premeditate a shot before the ball was delivered, he often predetermined when he would run down the pitch. A relative of his was once told a story in which a bowler saw Jessop coming and did not release the ball. According to Brodribb: “Jessop went on coming, so the bowler walked towards him. They met in the middle of the pitch, and the bowler said: ‘Eh, Gilbert, was there something you wanted to say to me, lad?'”

As well as being called “The Croucher”, Jessop acquired other names. For example, an 1897 poem by Ralph Paine, written during the tour of America by Pelham Warner’s team that included Jessop, featured the lines:

“At one end stocky Jessop frowned,
The human catapult,
Who wrecks the roofs of distant towns
When set in his assault”

C. B. Fry later borrowed the “catapult” for his description of Jessop’s 1902 innings at the Oval. Others dubbed Jessop with a different name, reflecting the educational background of many amateurs, which focussed on Classics: “Jessopus”, a name suggesting mythical heroism, and one with which Jessop often signed letters.

If Jessop was famed for fast scoring feats and big hitting, he also produced runs when they were most needed, such as on that famous occasion at the Oval. And one of his best performances came against Yorkshire at Bradford in 1900, where he benefited from the dimensions of a small ground. The home attack, which had carried all before it that season, comprised George Hirst, Wilfred Rhodes and Schofield Haigh. In reply to Yorkshire’s 409, Gloucestershire scored 269 of which Jessop scored a somewhat lucky 104 in 70 minutes (he was last man out). After bowling out Yorkshire for 187 in their second innings, Gloucestershire needed 328 to win. When Jessop came in, Gloucestershire were in some trouble at 69 for four (and 73 for five soon after). The first over that Rhodes bowled to him went for 18 runs (including two sixes out of the ground); later on, he again hit Rhodes twice out of the ground in one over. By lunch was 81 in 43 minutes, and soon after he reached his second century of the game in just 59 minutes. Having added 60 runs with Cyril Sewell, Jessop was joined by Francis Bateman-Champain, and they took Gloucestershire’s total to 233 for five when Rhodes was brought back into the attack. Jessop cut the first ball for four; the second he struck over the football stand for six; the third he left alone; the fourth he hit into the crowd (where he was caught by a spectator) for four (as it was not hit out of the ground, it did not count as six according to the pre-1910 version of the laws); the fifth went over the football stand for another six. Twenty runs had come from the first five balls, leaving Gloucestershire needing just 73 to win. Jessop drove the sixth ball high in the air, where it was caught one-handed by John Tunnicliffe, leaping on the boundary edge. He was out for 139 in 95 minutes (one observer suggested that 10 of those minutes had been spent “recovering the ball”) out of 182 runs scored. Rhodes took another two wickets to finish with six for 120 from 24.4 overs (and fourteen for 192 in the game from 45.3 overs), but he had been hit for seven sixes by Jessop (who scored 76 from the 27 deliveries Rhodes bowled to him), and in the seven overs before he had Jessop caught, he had conceded 81 runs. And under the post-1910 rules, several of his fours in the game would have counted as six: he hit as many as 20 deliveries over the boundary. But Yorkshire eventually won by 40 runs. And that season, Rhodes took 261 first-class wickets at 13.81.

Wilfred Rhodes (Image: Wikipedia)

Jessop later wrote of that season: 

“I had a good deal of experience of Wilfred’s bowling in 1900, for apart from the two meetings in the County Championship, we saw something of each other in the Gentlemen v Players matches at Lord’s and Scarborough, as well as in two North v South matches, and Yorkshire v C. I. Thornton’s XI. We faced each other in fourteen innings — one of which was incompleted — and on no fewer than eight occasions I fell to Wilfred’s wiles. Small wonder, therefore, if the cricket reports of the Yorkshire evening papers should be so frequently headed: ‘Jessop again falls a victim to Rhodes.’ Still, I had no good reason to feel that I was one of Wilfred’s ‘rabbits’, for in the course of those fourteen innings I had managed to ‘pouch’ some six hundred and forty-seven runs. Luck as regards the state of the pitch was on my side, for only on three occasions did the conditions favour the bowler. No matter how much Wilfred was ‘punched’ he always came up smiling for more, and as he had supreme confidence in his fieldsmen and bowled to them with unerring accuracy, he seldom failed to reap his reward.”

Rhodes also remembered that game. Haigh had suggested that the team should bowl wide to Jessop, to make him reach for the ball, “but the wider we bowled, the harder he hit the ball, and five times he hit me from well outside the off-stump into Horton Park … After that match I said to Schof. [Haigh], ‘From now on I’m going to bowl well up and straight. Then if he misses, I’ll hit.” Rhodes suggested to one interviewer that after this, apart from when Jessop scored 233 for The Rest of England against Yorkshire in 1901, “he never put up a big score against us again”, but this is not supported by the figures as he continued to score heavily against Yorkshire for the rest of his career, although he only scored one century after 1901.

Perhaps the innings against Yorkshire at Bradford is more illustrative of Jessop’s impact than any other. Not only did he change the course of a game almost single-handedly, he disrupted the plans of probably the best bowling attack in England and forced a complete tactical rethink. And although Gloucestershire ultimately lost, all the praise in the aftermath — even in Yorkshire, despite his annihilation of the home attack — was directed at Jessop. Undoubtedly the valiant failure of a glamorous amateur was worth more in cricket at that time than the fourteen wickets by one of its leading professionals, but that is a slightly different story.

But if Jessop was revered in England, Australians were less impressed. The 1902 team had openly dismissed his batting ability before the Oval innings, and that century does not seem to have altered their opinion too much. For example, the reminiscences of the 1902 Australian captain Joe Darling, published by his son in 1970, offer little mention of Jessop; Monty Noble, another member of the 1902 side briefly listed Jessop’s innings as one of those memorable ones played on sticky wickets, but was otherwise silent on his batting (he was mentioned as a good fielder); Clem Hill’s “autobiography” published by Australian newspapers in 1933 classed him as a bowler when considering the 1902 season and praised his fielding. The reason for these reservations was revealed by Hill in another article:

“Jessop was a great hitter. He was not a success in Australia, his highest score in Tests being only 35. But in England, where the wickets are slower, he would jump out and hit the ball very hard. He should have been stumped off Saunders in this Test at Kennington Oval [in 1902] before he had made 30. He was down the pitch two yards, and did not attempt to got back until he saw that the wicketkeeper had fumbled the ball. He scrambled home just in time. Darling was a great captain, but we thought he was in error in this match. The only way Jessop could play Trumble was by jumping out and hitting him. One end of the Kennington Oval is longer than the other. Trumble was bowling from the short end, known as the pavilion end, with the result that Jessop was hitting him into the grandstand. If he had been on at the long end, and Jessop had continued making the same lusty hits, be would have been caught in the outfield.”

Much more could be said of Jessop’s batting. But for contemporaries, his fielding was just as impressive. Although he held 464 catches in 493 first-class matches, it was his ground-fielding that astonished spectators, particularly his returns which resulted in many run-outs. He was a specialist extra-cover and despite the amateur ethos that decried practice in sport, he was very analytical and worked hard to improve this part of his game. He even studied baseball in an attempt to develop his fielding technique. Perhaps he was inspired by his love of that part of the game; he once wrote that “fielding has ever been to me the most attractive feature of cricket”. And as the captain of Gloucestershire, he demanded that his side could field well, and on occasion left out batters who he did not believe to be good enough fielders. In this sense, he was considerably ahead of his time.

And Jessop was a deep thinker on the game. In 1906–07, he wrote a series of perceptive but anonymous open letters to the Athletic News 1906-07 under the name “Incognitus”, addressed to famous cricketers such as W. G. Grace or C. B. Fry (and he wrote one of these anonymous letters to himself), critiquing their games and occasionally offering criticism, such as his own determination “to hit every ball to the boundary” or his observation to F. S. Jackson that not every amateur could afford to play as often as Jackson did, as they were not “born with a golden spoon in their mouths”. Unlike other amateurs, he believed that Test matches represented the peak of cricket and he thought that they were the most exciting games to play; he disagreed with the notion that their importance detracted from the spirit or enjoyment of the game. As a captain he was positive but often unorthodox; Wisden was sometimes critical of his alterations to his batting order or his habit of choosing to field after winning the toss. But he was always willing to bowl at moments of greatest pressure and was at the forefront in fielding. And he received a great deal of credit for leading a side which, other than him, often lacked quality.

Jessop was keen to make cricket as attractive as possible for spectators, and disliked the number of draws in county cricket; among his solutions were wider wickets, earlier starts, the abolition of tea intervals, and fewer flat pitches. He was also keen that games should begin on Saturdays to guarantee play for spectators at the weekend (county games — which were scheduled for three days — were usually played Monday–Wednesday and Thursday–Saturday). After experiments in 1912 and 1913, and after the First World War, Saturday starts became standard. Among his other ideas were the standardisation of rules for Tests (which were different in England and Australia), the removal of restrictions around the declaration, the less frequent publication of batting/bowling averages in newspapers, the pooling and sharing of gate money for home and away matches between two counties, and the abolition of the toss. He also favoured paying professionals more, particularly those with more experience. He also favoured the introduction of a knock-out “cup” for counties.

Some of these ideas emerged after his career had ended. If his fame meant that he continued to attract press and public attention, he had little influence with administrators. In fact, he developed a reputation as a “reformer” which did not always go down well with establishment figures. Instead, they preferred to remember him as one of the most unique and destructive batters of all time. For all the changes to cricket since Jessop’s day, that reputation remains in place. If we cannot really compare him to modern players, it is clear that he was such an outlier that he stands out as exceptional. Perhaps he was ahead of his time in how he approached cricket, perhaps not; but the amount of discussion, analysis and excitement that his batting generated among press, opponents and spectators was certainly a sign of things to come.

“One of the most famous innings of all history”: Gilbert Jessop and England’s Fastest Test Century

An illustration from a contemporary newspaper showing Gilbert Jessop hitting Hugh Trumble onto the pavilion for the second time in an over (Image: England versus Australia: A Pictorial History (1993) by David Frith)

The adoption by England’s Test batters of the approach dubbed “Bazball” from the summer of 2022 has set new standards for scoring quickly in Test matches, but despite several close calls, one long-standing landmark has remained untouched: that of the fastest Test century by an English batter. When Johnny Bairstow (against New Zealand in 2022) and Harry Brook (against Pakistan in 2022–23) came very close to breaking a record set over 120 years ago — a time when cricket was in many ways a different sport to its modern counterpart — the press resurrected a name that had almost been forgotten. Despite all the innovations in the modern game, for all the attacking players who had appeared for England since then, no-one has reached three figures faster than Gilbert Jessop, who took just 76 balls in a Test match against Australia at the Oval in 1902. To previous generations, Jessop’s innings was among the most famous of all, but in more recent years, it has been gradually forgotten. Yet it has remained stubbornly in the record book, and although surpassed by players for other countries (the first being Australia’s Jack Gregory against South Africa in 1921), no English batter has quite managed to get there faster at the time of writing. But there are several curiosities about this innings, not least the circumstances in which Jessop scored his runs.

The most surprising fact is that we know about this record at all. In 1902, it was not common practice to record the number of deliveries faced by batters. Any analysis of fast scoring used the metric of minutes batted; while this has obvious statistical drawbacks, it perhaps better reflected the experience of the spectator. As there was no indication of how many deliveries a batter faced, certainly for the spectators but not even in scorebooks, the rate at which someone was scoring could only be judged by the clock. Therefore, for example, scoring a century in an hour would have been regarded as an achievement, however many balls it had taken. For the modern statistician, this is more problematic. At a time when over-rates were practically double what they are today (it was common for between 20 and 25 overs per hour to be bowled in county cricket), a batter might face around 60 balls per hour on average, but this was likely to be higher if he was dominating the strike.

More mathematically minded writers — and they did exist even in 1902 — recognised that simply recording how long a person batted hid a lot of information about the innings and so, occasionally, someone might keep track of the number of deliveries faced. This became more frequent as time went on, but even in the 1960s was not standard practice. But Jessop was always a special case; journalists often made a specific note of how many deliveries he had faced and there are an unusually high number of his innings for which we know this detail.

But the 1902 series looks to have been something of an outlier because there are several innings for which deliveries were recorded. For example, during the first Test, the Daily Express noted that when J. T. Tyldesley scored 138 — an innings which rescued England from deep trouble on the first day (although he was dropped three times on 43) — he faced 304 deliveries. And someone had clearly kept a meticulous record as the newspaper was able to give details of how many runs he scored and how many deliveries he faced from each bowler. The Express was also able to reveal that Jessop’s fourth-innings 55 in the third Test — in a lost cause — came from 48 balls, which it regarded as slow by his standards.

However, the latter part of that 1902 series was generally played at a frenetic pace, almost comparable with the modern game. In the third Test, Australia scored at four runs per over in their second innings. And subsequent research of scorebooks by statisticians has revealed details unknown to those who watched. In that third Test, Victor Trumper scored a fifty in just 55 balls (in 39 minutes); Clem Hill scored a century from 105 deliveries (115 minutes); and Jessop, in his futile 55, reached fifty from 45 deliveries. In the first innings of the fourth Test, Australia again scored at almost four runs per over; Trumper, in what must be one of the greatest innings of all, scored a century before lunch on the opening day, in tricky conditions, and reached fifty from 50 balls (52 minutes) and three figures from 95 balls in 108 minutes. Among his team-mates to reach fifty in that innings, Reggie Duff (60 balls), Hill (80 balls) and the captain Joe Darling (83 balls) did so at a speed that would not be out of place today.

These statistics are generally accepted as accurate, and are recorded on CricketArchive. But they are the result of modern research; at the time, there was little interest in such matters.

Gilbert Jessop batting (Image: Wikipedia)

Except, oddly, in the case of Gilbert Jessop. He had made his reputation over the previous few seasons as one of the fastest scoring batters in the world. He was not a “slogger” — although he had begun his career batting in such a style — as his technique was relatively orthodox by the standards of the time. Similarly to his contemporary Trumper, he played “proper” shots, but was more eager to play them than most of his team-mates. Since 1899, despite the pace at which he scored, Jessop was among the highest scoring batters in England; in 1900 and 1901, he averaged over 40 with the bat, a benchmark of the highest quality at the time. He had first played for England in 1899 as a fast bowler, but a back injury had reduced his effectiveness with the ball. He was picked by Archie MacLaren for his experimental team that toured Australia in 1901–02 but averaged just 18.44 in the five Tests. While MacLaren remained a huge supporter of Jessop, not everyone was convinced. In fact, at Test level, Jessop was far from impressive until his famous century at the Oval. After scoring 51 on his England debut, he passed 30 only twice in his next twelve innings.

Nevertheless, Jessop’s achievements at county level — not least his repeated success against Yorkshire’s high quality bowling attack — ensured that his reputation among English critics was high; they recognised his ability to change a game in the space of an hour. Yet when the Australians arrived in England for their 1902 tour, they were openly critical of Jessop; it was common knowledge that they did not rate him as a batter. Yet it was observed throughout that summer, well before his Oval performance, that whenever he came into bat against them, the field immediately scattered, often to cheers from the crowd.

However, for the first three Tests of the series, Jessop was little more than an onlooker. The first Test had been drawn when rain all but washed out the last of the three days allocated to the game, when England were almost certain of victory after scoring 376 for nine and bowling out Australia for 36. Rain prevented all but an hour-and-three-quarters of the second Test, when the Australians, ravaged by injury and illness, were struggling to find eleven fit players. But with everyone recovered in time for the third Test, played at Sheffield, Australia dominated and won easily. Perhaps conditions marginally favoured them at times, but they were clearly superior after seizing the initiative in their second innings through Trumper and Hill.

Therefore, with two games left, despite their strong showing earlier in the series, England were 1–0 down. And despite his fifty, Jessop’s place was being called into question. If MacLaren was a “believer” — arguing in selection meetings (according to the not-always-reliable C. B. Fry) that Jessop could turn any game with his hitting and, even if he failed, was worth his place for his fielding alone — F. S. Jackson (who was a selector for some of the Tests) considered him a gamble. The press was divided; some newspapers, such as the Yorkshire Post, argued that J. R. Mason of Kent was a better option, but others such as the Daily Telegraph were supportive of Jessop. Alfred Pullin — “Old Ebor” — was particularly critical of Jessop’s continued selection, but he was not alone. There were mutterings that he simply did not have the technique for Test cricket, which grew after he was dismissed for 12 in the first innings of the Sheffield Test (he had scored 6 in the first Test but did not bat in the second). Although he was praised for 48-ball 55 (having volunteered to open the batting) in what was effectively a lost cause in England’s second innings, it was his first fifty since his Test debut and could not mask a mediocre record until that point. In nine Tests, he had scored 294 runs at an average of 21.00. Nor was his form in county matches particularly good.

Therefore, when the team was named for the fourth Test, and Jessop was omitted, there was little outright criticism, and some support, particularly from “Old Ebor”. In fact the northern press was quite critical of Jessop; the Leeds Mercury stated: “The Selection Committee have come round to the public way of thinking in dropping G. L. Jessop, who, despite his 50 at Sheffield,  is too uncertain a quantity for so important a match.” However, part of the reason for Jessop’s omission might have been that MacLaren was not at the selection meeting, for reasons that are unclear; it is possible that F. S. Jackson attended, but the composition of the committee was not published for that particular game (for the only time in the series) so that we do not know who was present other than the officially appointed selectors. In a somewhat self-justifying letter written in 1919, MacLaren complained that he had requested the selection of Jessop but had been ignored. This was the Test in which several selections were made that look odd with hindsight — such as the selection of Fred Tate and Lionel Palairet — but which were not criticised in the build-up to the game. And Jessop, on form, could not really complain about being dropped.

Jessop playing a sweep shot (Image: The Croucher: A Biography of Gilbert Jessop (1974) by Gerald Brodribb)

But the perception of the selectors was altered by what happened in that fourth Test, held at Manchester, which is still one of the most exciting ever played; an astonishing innings by Trumper and some inspired bowling — and again, just the slightest amount of luck that left England batting in the worst conditions — drove Australia, amid incredible tension, to a three-run win. Therefore, Australia had already won the series when they went into the final Test. England faced a potential 3–0 loss, which might have been a little unfair given how closely contested the series had been except at Sheffield. And with hindsight, the omission of Jessop was criticised as an inexcusable blunder.

Therefore, for the final Test, Jessop was restored to the team, as was the Yorkshire all-rounder George Hirst. The latter had been in terrible form and dropped for Manchester; but in all fairness, like in the case of Jessop, it was only clear in retrospect that he should have played. But there is just a hint that Jessop was still a marginal selection for the final Test. He retained the letter he had been sent by Lord Hawke, inviting him to play, and it contained a very odd line: “[The selection committee] wish me to tell you that Archie MacLaren has guaranteed that you will bowl for at least half to three-quarters of an hour at a stretch, and they sincerely hope that this is correct as it materially affects the bowling strength of the side.” Jessop replied that he was no longer capable of playing as a front-line bowler. Had MacLaren been bargaining with his fellow selectors? Had he tried to argue that Jessop could be played as an all-rounder to strengthen both the attack and his claims for a place? If so, Jessop’s honesty might have cost him, but Hawke replied that it was not important. Therefore, with the confusion cleared up, Jessop agreed to play.

The final Test was another extraordinary game, aside from what Jessop achieved. Australia batted first, and runs from the tail took them from 175 for seven — George Hirst took five of those wickets and finished with five for 77 — to a total of 324 at the close of the first day (123.5 overs had been bowled in six hours). In reply, England once again had the worse luck; rain early on the second morning affected the pitch and in difficult conditions, the home side slumped to 83 for six when Jessop was out for 13. But for an innings of 43 from Hirst, England might have had to follow-on; in the end the batters dragged the total up to 183 in the mid-afternoon, giving Australia an apparently decisive lead of 141 on the first innings. Hugh Trumble, who had troubled England — and Jessop in particular — all summer, had taken eight wickets for 65 runs.

Early in Australia’s second innings, Jessop ran out Trumper with a sharp piece of fielding, a vital wicket and one that Archie MacLaren later claimed to be the turning point of the match (however as he also wrote that he had been trying to tell his fellow selectors all summer that Jessop would run out Trumper at least once if he played in every game, he could have been making a point). And it was Jessop’s reputation as a fielder that secured the wicket as Trumper’s opening partner Reggie Duff had fatally sent him back when he saw that Jessop had the ball. Australia never quite recovered and by the end of the second day, had only managed to score 114 for eight. But more rain fell overnight, making Australia — with a lead already worth 255 — overwhelming favourites. Jessop, who was dining with the team on the second evening as rain began to fall, tried to cheer everyone up by offering to take bets that someone would score a century — very unlikely in the conditions that the players expected to greet them in the morning.

The only known photograph of Jessop’s innings at the Oval, taken by George Belham. He is playing what looks like a pull-sweep to the bowling of Jack Saunders; from the reaction of the fielders it has travelled to square leg (Image via England versus Australia: A Pictorial History (1993) by David Frith)

When play resumed on the third and final day (13 August 1902), in front of 18,000 spectators, Australia were quickly dismissed for 121. The day had begun dry, but the pitch was still wet from the overnight rain, so that England’s target of 263 was a very difficult one. In such conditions, it was often difficult for a team even to reach a total of 100. Three quick wickets fell, before more rain interrupted play and threatened to keep the conditions unfavourable for batting. When play resumed, two more wickets fell to bring Jessop in to bat twenty minutes before lunch with the scoreboard reading 48 for five; all those who had been dismissed had been unable to cope with the bowling of Trumble and Jack Saunders — who had taken four of the five wickets to fall. Only Stanley Jackson, who was still in the middle, seemed capable of resisting. As Jessop walked through the pavilion, MacLaren was heard to say to him: “I bet you don’t make a century.” Jessop replied: “Done!” This might have been a reference to the bet of the night before. But expectations cannot have been too high, among either the spectators or the England team.

Although playing a little more cautiously than usual — he was careful not to hit across the line to Trumble as he had been caught several times off that bowler at what today would be known as “cow corner” — Jessop quickly began to attack. He played aggressively against Saunders and drove successive balls from Trumble to the boundary, the first of them onto the roof of the pavilion but according to the rules of the time, worth only four runs (to score six, the ball had to be hit out of the ground). But when he had reached 22, he completely missed a delivery from Saunders and should have been stumped, but the Australian wicket-keeper J. J. Kelly could not gather a ball which had kept low. And when Jessop had scored 26, he hit the ball low too long off, where Trumper ran to reach the ball, but could only get a hand to it as it swerved away from him.

When lunch was taken, Jessop had scored 29 from 21 deliveries; he and Jackson (who had reached 39) had added 39 and the score was 87 for five; the target was still some distance away. The pitch, however, had eased very slightly. Jackson. on the other hand, having looked the vastly superior batter before the interval, struggled after the resumption, and was dropped at slip off Saunders when he had scored 41. Jessop looked much more confident, late-cutting a four before four byes took England to 100. A deliberate cut through the slips (and the vast playing area of the Oval) allowed Jessop an all-run five before a single took him to fifty (scored from 38 deliveries in 43 minutes while he and Jackson had added 70).

And then Jessop cut loose. While Jackson continued to struggle — he was dropped again in the slips — Jessop pulled Saunders for four and cut him for another. In that bowler’s next over, he scored 17 runs: after a very modern slog-swept four, and a pull for another, Saunders lost his length, and a full toss and a half volley were also sent to the boundary, before Jessop took a single off the fifth ball (Jessop’s last eight deliveries had brought 21 runs). Saunders was replaced by the very accurate leg-breaks of Warwick Armstrong, who bowled on or outside leg stump with five men on the legside boundary. There was something of a pause here; Jessop scored only one run from his next eleven deliveries and managed only four from 18 in this period. But eventually, Jessop stepped away and cut Armstrong for four, then found a gap through the legside ring for another. At this stage, the Australians were clearly shaken and one spectator recalled the fielders running in every direction as they tried to plug gaps in the field.

With the score on 157, Jackson was finally out for 49, sending a return catch to Trumble. He had added 109 with Jessop for the sixth wicket in 67 minutes to give England hope, and the next man in was George Hirst, who at the time was among the leading batters in England. Hirst survived a confident lbw appeal early on, and Jessop decided it was time to attack Trumble. He twice struck him high into the pavilion (again, shots only worth four runs); the second hit was caught by a spectator, H. K. Foster, who played for Worcestershire. That shot took Jessop to 96. When he came on strike to Armstrong in the next over, he cut him for four to reach his century. It had taken just 75 minutes and came from 76 deliveries; his second fifty, despite the lull in the middle, took 38 deliveries, the same as his first fifty. He received a huge ovation from the enthralled crowd. Having hit an uppish four through square leg to take his score to 104 (he had scored 29 runs from his last 14 deliveries), he was caught there almost immediately after to be out for 104. He had scored his runs out of 139 in 77 minutes; the praise was unanimous. Wisden said of the innings: “All things considered a more astonishing display has never been seen. What he did would have been scarcely possible under the same circumstances to any other living batsmen.” The Australians, who might have finally being convinced of his ability, applauded him all the way back to the pavilion. Jessop later said that he was most pleased by the restraint with which he had played Trumble: resisting the urge to play across the line and taking singles instead.

The players — led by the English batters George Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes — run from the field after England’s one-wicket win, pursued by a jubilant crowd and photographed by George Beldam (Image via England versus Australia: A Pictorial History (1993) by David Frith)

Although Jessop had turned the game, his dismissal left England 187 for seven, still needing 76 with three wickets left. Thanks to an unbeaten 58 from Hirst, some lower order runs, and a desperate last-wicket partnership of 15 with Wilfred Rhodes (who opened the batting for England ten years later), England won by one wicket amid incredible tension. Nevertheless, it was merely a face-saving exercise; what had looked like being a 3–0 win for Australia was reduced to 2–1, which was probably a fairer result.

Such was the impact that the innings was mentioned in the leading article of The Times, and inspired prose and poetry for years to come. Jack Hobbs, who shortly joined the Oval groundstaff, later said that although he was not there that day, it was spoken of so often that he felt he knew every shot Jessop had played. C. B. Fry, who had been dropped from the England team earlier in the series, but watched this game, later wrote how Jessop “let himself loose like a catapult at the bowling and scattered it to smithereens. If ever an innings ought to have been filmed, that was the one.” Harry Altham, in his hugely influential History of Cricket (published several times since 1926), called Jessop’s century “one of the most famous innings of all history”. Even in 2019, Simon Wilde described it as “one of the most brilliant centuries ever made for England” in England: The Biography.

So how good was it? Trumble, without question, was one of Australia’s great bowlers and to survive against him while scoring so quickly in the conditions that prevailed was some achievement. Saunders was not quite in the same class, but had favourable conditions (and a questionable bowling action) and troubled everyone before Jessop took him apart. These two bowled all but nine of the overs faced by England. Armstrong was little more than accurate, and Noble — another excellent bowler — delivered five overs for 11 runs amid the carnage. In fact, the 1902 Australian team, even now, perhaps remains one of the strongest of all time. So Jessop’s runs were scored against a good attack in difficult conditions. Additionally, England faced certain defeat when he came in, so he changed the game completely. On the other hand, without runs from Jackson and Hirst, it would all have been in vain; it was not one of those innings in which someone played a lone hand. And with the series gone, England were playing only for pride.

Yet very few of the fastest Test centuries have been played in circumstances of great adversity; often, but not always, such innings occur when a bowling attack has already been broken. Only a few, such as Brendon McCullum’s 54-ball hundred against Australia (the fastest Test century of all) in 2015–16, or Roy Frederick’s 71-ball century against the same opposition in 1975–76 broke the opposition in the same way as Jessop. So too did Johnny Bairstow in 2022, with his 77-ball hundred against New Zealand, the fastest for England since Jessop. But maybe, just maybe, the particular circumstances surrounding Jessop’s still-famous innings — the match situation, the favourable conditions for bowlers, the events of the series, the question marks over his ability, and the fact he had been dropped for Manchester — make it not just one of the fastest, but also one of the best.

“Adventurous by nature”: The Legendary Hitting of C. I. Thornton

An illustration of Charles Thornton (Image: Cricket, 21 April 1887)

The modern era has seen a huge increase in the number of sixes. At the time of writing, there were 40 men to have hit at least 50 sixes in Test cricket, but only six of these played the entirety of their careers before 2000. Similarly, only two men who retired before 1980 reached thirty sixes in their Test career. There are various reasons for the increase in six-hitting: a change in mind-set, alterations in technique, advances in equipment. But the idea that six-hitting is a modern phenomenon is a little misleading: it might be more accurate to say that big-hitting fell out of fashion as cricket — especially at Test level — became more serious and batters preferred a safety-first approach of keeping the ball on the ground. In the nineteenth century, there were specialists “sloggers”, such as the Australian George Bonnor, whose aim was simply to hit the ball as far as possible. One of the biggest hitters of all was Charles Thornton, who played first-class cricket from 1866 until 1897. In 1960, Gerald Brodribb wrote in Hit for Six, his book about big-hitting batters: “[Thornton] was considered by all who saw him bat to have hit a cricket ball harder, higher, and farther than any other batsmen the game has ever seen.” However, he conceded: “Since his career ended over sixty years ago, we are dealing with another era and the dangers of legend.”

Charles Inglis Thornton was born on 20 March 1850 at Llanwarne, a village in Herefordshire. He was the youngest of the three children of Watson Joseph Thornton and Frances Anne Webb. His father was the rector of Llanwarne and held several administrative positions in the Church of England, as well as being a magistrate and serving on the Board of Guardians that ran workhouses in Hereford. But Thornton never really knew his parents; both died within the space of a few months in 1855, his father after a brief illness. A few weeks later, the entire contents of the rectory were sold at an auction.

It isn’t obvious what arrangements were made for the children, who must have been badly affected by their loss. The 1861 census records all three in different places: the eldest, the 18-year-old Frances Marianne Thornton, lived with her aunt Marianne in Clapham; Henry Sykes Thornton was a visitor at the house of John Rogers, a barrister and magistrate, in Sevenoaks; Charles lived with his aunt Isabella and her husband, Benjamin Harrison, the Archdeacon of Maidstone, in Canterbury. Writing about his life for The Cricketer in 1921, Thornton said that both he and his brother were adopted by the Archdeacon.

Around this time, Thornton attended Eton. Lord Harris, one of his contemporaries at the school, later recalled:

“His home during his Eton days was with his uncle and aunt — the venerable Archdeacon of Canterbury and Mrs Harrison — in the Precincts. Consequently he and I, as soon as we became acquainted, about 1866, saw much of each other and became very close friends. We played much local cricket together at Canterbury, and at various country houses, and he was a regular member of my Eleven at Belmont. We did a lot of hunting and shooting together. He was a very bold and hard rider on not very good — certainly not expensive — horses.”

Thornton’s Wisden obituary recorded: “He went to Eton in 1861, to the Rev. G. R. Dupuis’s house, and was in the [cricket] Eleven in 1866, 1867, and 1868, being captain in his last year. He also played in Oppidan and Mixed Wall and Field XI’s [teams which play the Eton Wall Game], won the School Fives [a game where a ball is hit against a wall with the hand] and was Keeper [effectively a captain in the Eton Wall Game] in 1867 and 1868, and won the Double Rackets and Putting the Weight in 1863, and Throwing the Cricket Ball in 1867.” Without going into the obscure and parochial nature of games at Eton, it is enough to say that he must have been good at sport. Away from the playing fields, Thornton became a King’s Scholar and a member of Pop (the Eton debating society), so he was far from just a sportsman. But any fame he had then and later was connected almost entirely with cricket.

His reminiscences for The Cricketer state that he first played cricket in the garden of his uncle and aunt and the nearby bowling green owned by the Archdeacon. He wrote: “I used to take on all the neighbouring boys at single wicket.” His first organised match came in 1861 when he scored 22 not out in a match at Great Mongeham, and took a catch. At Eton, his hitting attracted notice of the “Upper Club boys” and he “was summoned to Upper Club” (a cricket team for the boys in Upper School). He recalled that he was held back because the professional coach Fred Bell disapproved of him hitting the ball into the trees during practices; he wrote of Bell that “our ideas did not coincide”. In the same article, he was disparaging of coaching methods and the way that natural batting was discouraged.

But Andy Carter, a sports historian who has studied life at Eton in this period, suggests that Bell is unlikely to have held any influence over selection as he had been hired by one of the schoolboy captains of the team; moreover, professional coaches were reluctant to criticise the technique of boys who were far above them in the social hierarchy. Selection in 1865 — when Thornton was probably too young to have had a realistic prospect of being chosen — was in the hands of the captain George Lyttleton; the boys strongly resisted the involvement of any adults in running the team. Matters changed in 1866 with the appointment of R. A. H. Mitchell as master; he took charge of cricket and considerably improved the fortunes of the Eton team. Carter suggests that Thornton may have mistakenly believed that Bell had a similarly influential role.

Lord Harris later wrote about an incident when Thornton was given a trial by the Upper Club. When Thornton was fielding at long-leg, near the road, someone passed by carrying some food. As a wicket had fallen, and there was a lull in play, Thornton bought a bun and jam which he began eating. According to Harris’ foggy recollection: “It lasted long enough for play to be resumed. A high catch was hit to him, which I fancy he caught. What happened to the bun I never heard for certain. Some say he swallowed it, others again that he crammed it, jam and all, into his trousers pocket.” For the rest of his life, Thornton was known by the nickname “Buns”. A slightly different version was in circulation earlier — for example in the Bognor Regis Observer on 10 June 1896 — which said that the jam left a stain in his cricket trousers noted by the other players.

Another story recalled by Harris — who was clearly fond of Thornton — involved them going on a wild duck hunt near Sittingbourne during one very cold winter while they were at school. Thornton, despite the snow and ice, wore a nightgown for the hunt, borrowed from the housekeeper of Harris’ father, to everyone’s amusement.

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The Eton cricket team in 1866. Back three: T. H. W. Pelham, H. Gilliat and W. H. Walrond. Middle row: W. C. Higgins, R. N. R. Ferguson, C. I. Thornton, E. Lubbock, W. B. Barrington and J. W. Foley. Front row: H. M. Walter and J. C. Reiby.

For all his escapades off the field (or on the boundary), Thornton was clearly a talented cricketer, and although he made an impression more through the power of his hitting than the weight of his scores, he averaged 38 for Eton. Only a few innings stood out numerically: 42 against the Old Etonians, 47 against Winchester, 46 not out against Harrow (all in 1866); 76 against Christ Church Oxford, 118 against Windsor Garrison (1867); 44 against Harrow (1868). These were interspersed with lower scores and failures. But even his briefer innings could take the breath away. In his last game against Harrow — played, as always in those years, at Lord’s — he hit a ball over the pavilion (not the current structure).

Lord Harris later described the shot in his book A Few Short Runs (1921): “Thornton had just hit one ball against the old armoury which occupied the site of the members luncheon room, and had put one over Block D, when he followed these big hits — very big for a boy — by an astounding drive over the pavilion. He was bowled by a shooter next ball for a score of 44.”

While still at Eton, Thornton played several matches which are today recognised as first-class. Given his privileged background, he was only ever going to be an amateur. His first appearance was for the “Gentlemen of Kent” against the MCC at Canterbury in August 1866 — at the age of 16 — when he scored 26 and 24 in a low-scoring game. He played two similar games in 1867 — for the “South of the Thames” against the “North of the Thames”, and for Kent against the “Gentlemen of the MCC” — and two in 1868 — against for Kent against the MCC Gentlemen and also for Kent against Surrey. All of these games were part of the Canterbury Cricket Week, which took place at the beginning of every August, and Thornton was most likely chosen through a combination of his social connections (via his aunt) and his celebrity as a member of the Eton first eleven. The games were not especially competitive, and his highest score was just 36.

Thornton left Eton in 1868 and attended Trinity College, Cambridge. Inevitably, he was chosen for the University cricket team, and played in the eleven in each of his four seasons at Trinity (from 1869 until 1872). The most important fixture was the annual match against Oxford at Lord’s; Thornton was on the winning side in three games out of four. In his final year, when he was captain, he led Cambridge to an innings win. He continued to play for Kent when he was available.

Given the way he played, Thornton’s batting record at Cambridge was patchy (he scored 674 runs at an average of 18.72), but he had some big successes. Although the number of deliveries he faced was not recorded, nor in most cases how long he batted, it is a safe assumption that these large innings were scored quickly. In his first University match, he hit 50 and 36. Later that season, playing for Kent against Sussex, he scored his maiden first-class century; his final score of 124 included a four and nine sixes. Under the Laws of Cricket as they stood at the time, a hit over the boundary rope would only count as four; to score six, the ball had to go out of the ground, not just the playing field. Thornton also scored 76 out of a total of 114 against Nottinghamshire and 110 opening the batting against Surrey.

He was less successful in 1870. His best score was 75 for Cambridge against the Gentlemen of England, but he scored 48 and 41 not out for the South against the North in the Canterbury Cricket Week. In 1871, he scored 74 for Cambridge against the Gentlemen of England, two other fifties, and 111 for Kent against Surrey (in 93 minutes with 18 fours). But in the year of his captaincy, he failed with the bat for his university, and his highest score for Kent was 63 against Surrey.

Over the following seasons, Thornton played quite regularly, but not too often in county games. He appeared for the MCC, for various “England XI” teams or other scratch sides, and in the Canterbury Festival. In 1875, he began to play for Middlesex, having begun to work in London and qualified for the county by residence.

Charles Thornton from a photograph printed in 1893 (Image: Wikipedia)

But after 1871, his only first-class centuries were scored for the Gentlemen of England against I Zingari at Scarborough in 1886 and 1887. In 1886, he scored 107 not out in 70 minutes out of 133 runs scored. This included eight sixes (which, remember, had to be hit out of the ground) and twelve fours; one of the sixes apparently went through the open window of a house opposite the ground in Trafalgar Square, just missing the resident old lady, and a second went over that house and into the Square on the other side. This was later measured at 138 yards, but was reckoned notable because of the height it achieved. His 1887 century was scored in 70 minutes with three sixes and 17 fours.

Thornton’s overall first-class average in 217 games was 19.35 (which was slightly better than it sounds given that he played in a low-scoring period, but not especially good). In fact, the only seasons in which he averaged over 25 having played five or more games were 1869 and 1886. However, his average in the 18 matches he played for Kent was 29.06, which very high for the time.

What seems to have made his reputation was a series of cameos, not dissimilar to modern T20 innings, in which he blazed away to play some spectacular shots and then got out. His Wisden obituary records:

“Adventurous by nature, he felt that in cricket he could indulge this spirit to the full … Individual in style, he jumped quickly to the ball in making his magnificent drives … In his brilliant career he put together many scores of a hundred in remarkable time, and the length of some of his drives was enormous. It is on record, for instance, that in the North v. South match at Canterbury in 1871, he hit a ball from N. V. M. Rose strictly measured 152 yards, while at the practice nets at Hove the same year he sent it 168 yards 2 feet and 162 yards. Playing against Harrow at Lord’s in 1868, he drove the ball over the old Pavilion, and at the Oval he accomplished the same feat, while it is noted that at Canterbury he hit V. E. Walker out of the ground each ball of an over. The over then consisted of four balls.”

Gerald Brodribb analysed some of these supposed huge shots in Hit for Six, and notes that there are more long distances recorded for Thornton than anyone else: “His big hits were so frequent that people were ready to leap out with tape-measures and make an instant note of them.” Brodribb also mentions a quote by the cricketer W. J. Ford: “It may safely be stated that Thornton seldom scored 50 runs in an innings without hitting at least one ball to a distance of 140 yards to the pitch, and his off-driving, even if not high in the air, was terrific. One had only to stand on the boundary to realise the tremendous pace he got on the ball.”

Thornton was not muscular, and his power seems to have come from a swing of the hips, a fast bat-swing and his habit — unusual for a hitter at the time — of running to the pitch of the ball. Contemporaries said, somewhat unconvincingly, that Thornton was so fast with bat swing and footwork that if he missed the ball he could get back to his crease without being stumped (although he was stumped 30 times in 374 innings, which was well above average for the time). His speed may have been assisted by a refusal to wear normal batting pads (he wore shin-pads like those used in football) and he only began wearing a glove (only on his left hand) late in his career.

Among his more notable feats — impressive even today — Brodribb lists several: hitting David Buchanan (for Cambridge against the Gentlemen of England) for 6446 in one (four-ball) over at Fenner’s in 1871; for his own “C. I. Thornton’s XI” against Cambridge in 1885, he drove T. Lindley over the wall of the Fenner’s ground and over the tennis courts (an eyewitness claimed a distance of around 150 yards, which would be roughly accurate according to google maps) during his innings of 56. He hit V. E. Walker four times “out of the ground” when Kent played the MCC at Canterbury in 1869; Thornton scored 44 (caught W. G. Grace, bowled Walker). Lord Harris wrote of this in his tribute to Thornton:

“I see it is related of him that he hit V. E. Walker out of the Canterbury ground four times in one over. I saw the over, and I can see him now jumping in and the ball sailing away, but I doubt each ball going out of the ground — one or two perhaps, and all over the ring, but out of the ground I doubt. He was hitting them towards the Pavilion, but his biggest hit at Canterbury I should say was on another occasion from the other end out of the ground – a very long carry.”

Brodribb states that all the hits were fours (remembering that hits over the boundary only counted as four unless they went out of the ground), but that another hit in that innings landed in a field near the entrance gate. And he lists two measurements taken from Thornton’s hits at Canterbury: an on-drive into a nearby field off F. C. Cobden which was measured at 132 yards in a Kent v MCC game in 1870. In the equivalent fixture for 1871, he scored 19 in eight minutes (46144, though there is no indication that this was from successive deliveries). The six supposedly went into the road outside the ground, and was measured at 152 yards.

Of his innings of 111 against Surrey at Canterbury in 1871, Thornton later remembered hitting James Southerton into a tree twelve times (which only counted as four under the rules of the time), presumably the famous lime tree at the ground. In the first innings of that match (when he scored 44), he scored 16 runs (6442) from one over by Southerton. Other famous achievements also involved big distances. W. G. Grace recalled Thornton at the Oval hitting sixes out ground on three of its sides, and once sending three balls in a row over the grandstand next to the pavilion.

The supposed biggest hit of all came at Hove in 1876, while he was practising in front of the pavillion. He hit a ball from G. L. King which went into the road outside the ground, where it landed in front of James Pycroft, who noted the spot and measured it: 168 yards and two feet (the figure most commonly given). Brodribb later investigated the hit in some depth and wrote about it in The Cricketer. He discovered that the hit came from a gentle lob bowled in the practice area, and the recording of the distance varied greatly over the years — from 140 yards to the 168 yards generally cited. It also seems that Pycroft may not actually have seen the ball land, so despite the supposed accuracy implied by the precise figure of 168 yards and two feet, the distance was no more than an estimate.

Among his other hitting achievements, Thornton struck F. M. Buckland four sixes in one over in 1876, while at Twickenham in 1878, he made a hit from the bowling of Harry Boyle for the Orleans Club against the Australians which was measured at 152 yards.

It is hard to know what to make of these distances. It seems unlikely that any measurements were made with an accuracy that would be acceptable today, but at the same time it is even less likely that they would be wrong by 10 yards or more (unless the distance included how far the ball travelled after pitching). Yet hits over 140 yards (128 metres) seem unlikely with old equipment, given this is longer than almost all sixes recorded more verifiably by players with modern bats, and physiques more adept at power-hitting. An article by Charles Davis in 2016 casts justifiable skepticism on the claims made for Thornton, but it seems even if some figures may be questionable, he was an extraordinary hitter who cleared the ground on a remarkable number of occasions.

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The Scarborough Festival around 1913

Aside from his record hits, Thornton’s most lasting fame came through his association with the Scarborough Festival. The first such event there was held in 1876, and Thornton was involved from the beginning. The idea was developed after the success of a game, sponsored by Lord Londesborough, between the MCC (under the captaincy of Thornton) and Yorkshire at Scarborough. When Londesborough became the MCC President the following year, a whole programme was organised, extending over nine days.

But if Londesborough technically began the traditional festival, which continues in to be held annually, Thornton did more than anyone to make it a success, perhaps influenced by his experiences at the Canterbury Week. His Wisden obituary said:

“To him more than to anybody else was due the success of the annual Scarborough Festival. He was largely instrumental in starting it, and although he had long given up cricket he never lost his interest in the famous Week, even until last season. To mark the esteem in which he was held and to recognise his services to the Scarborough Festival, which had then been in existence a quarter of a century, he was, in 1894, presented with a silver loving-cup subscribed for by the members of the Scarborough Cricket Club. He received another presentation in 1921 and was also given the freedom of the borough.”

His long association with Scarborough extended far beyond his playing career, which ended in 1897. Almost every Test side that toured England between 1890 and 1929 faced a team selected by Thornton (“C. I. Thornton’s XI”) as part of the Scarborough Festival (the only exceptions being in 1909 and 1912 when the tourists played “Lord Londesborough’s XI” and when the 1928 West Indies team — like their non-Test counterparts in 1923 — played “H. D. G. Leveson Gower’s XI”).

What of his life away from cricket? The 1871 census records him living on Harley Street with his sister Frances, who had married a doctor called Reginald Southey. After that, he is hard to locate. He was probably overseas at the time of later censuses; he was certainly rich enough and enjoyed travelling abroad. Someone called Charles Thornton was living in the area of St George Hanover Square at the time of the 1891 census, “living on his own means” and married to a woman called Frances, seven years his junior. This man was listed as being born in Wales — our C. I. Thornton was born close to Wales, but not in it — but there is no other trace of this Thornton, nor of his marriage to this Frances. However, there may be more to this, as we shall see, because in 1902 our Thornton did marry someone of this name: Frances Jane Clements, who was a few years older than him. She had divorced her first husband, who had left her for another woman, the previous year.

As for the rest of his life away from cricket, his Wisden obituary spelt matters out plainly:

“In business Thornton was in the timber trade for 35 years [he was a partner in the firm Raffety, Thornton & Co Ltd], and retired in 1912. A keen motorist, he was also extremely fond of travelling, having been all through Japan, Siberia, and Russia. When the [First World] War broke out he was in Berlin, and was very nearly caught. In his book, East and West and Home Again, he described a trip round the world. He had been a member of the MCC and of the Orleans Club for fifty years. He married Fanny, daughter of Mr. Charles Dowell, of Croydon, but left no children.”

But there are just a couple of hints that he was perhaps more interesting than history suggests. The first came in a court case held at the Old Bailey in 1907 when Samuel Gurney Massey, the director of a company called the Economic Bank, was on trial for fraud. Thornton was a witness, speaking in favour of Massey; the court records state that Thornton, identified as a “merchant in the city”, said that “he had known prisoner for 33 years; prisoner had always borne the character of a thoroughly respectable honest man.” Nevertheless, Massey was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months imprisonment.

Thornton was also involved in a bizarre libel case in 1916. Thornton prosecuted a man called John Augustus Rawlinson, a former bicycling instructor whom Thornton had previously employed to give lessons to his wife but who at the time was working as an electrician. Although the details were kept deliberately vague in the trial, Rawlinson was apparently preparing to send libellous letters to prominent people that accused Thornton of adultery as part of a blackmail scheme. The accusations were not read out but appeared connected with Frances Thornton and her earlier marriage. It is not impossible that Thornton had been living with Frances before her divorce — maybe it was him on the 1891 census — which would doubtless have affected her divorce settlement had her first husband known.

One part of the letter examined in court said that Thornton was “unfit and unworthy to associate with decent men”. Rawlinson — who had previously abandoned his wife, been found guilty of bigamy, and driven the owner of a house in which he was boarding to close her premises after he became a nuisance — pleaded guilty to libel and was sentenced to nine months imprisonment. The Recorder who heard the case confessed that he did not understand the letter, and the whole affair seems very strange; before being cut off by the Recorder (who realised he was about to make more accusations), Rawlinson said that the incident with Thornton had a “long and pathetic history”.

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Charles Thornton (left) with the England captain Percy Chapman (centre) and H. D. G. Leveson Gower (right) at Scarborough in 1928

Thornton died on 10 December 1929, and so famous had he been that even the New York Times had an obituary. But as he had never played Test cricket, his name faded over time until today he is hardly known at all, despite being the biggest hitter of his day and a batter who might have fitted perfectly into modern cricket.

“If he had been able to remain in England, great things might have been expected”: The Abortive Cricket Career of Ahsan-ul-Haq

Ahsan-ul-Haq (Image: Cricket, 7 August 1902)

The story of Ranjitsinhji is a familiar one, but it is less well-known that there were several South Asian cricketers in England around the turn of the twentieth century. One of the better players was Ahsan-ul-Haq, who became the first Muslim to play first-class and county cricket in England. His sporting career was short; he qualified as a barrister in 1902 and was all but lost to cricket. Instead, he pursued a legal career in British India, eventually becoming a judge. But he had a glorious swan-song 22 years later when, in a brief return to the first-class game at the age of 45, he scored one of the fastest centuries recorded at that level. Forgotten today, Ahsan appeared alongside some of the best cricketers in the world, such as Fred Spofforth and Andrew Stoddart. He could have been a great batter in different circumstances, and even in the short time he played, he overcame several barriers and the widespread prejudices of late-Victorian England.

Ahsan-ul-Haq was born on 16 July 1878 in Jullundur, a city now known as Jalandhar, in the Punjab when it was part of British India. He was the son of Ghulam Hussain, who had been awarded the Order of British India; he held the title of Sardar Bahadur which might indicate military or police service. But no further information is available about Ahsan’s family or early life.

Ahsan studied at Aligarh College, the main Muslim college in India at the time. Cricket was an important part of life there, given that the institution was modelled on Oxford and Cambridge, and explicitly copied the British educational system. Ahsan’s brother, who preceded him in both attending the college and playing for its cricket team, taught him the rudiments of the game before he came under the influence of Shaukat Ali, the captain of the first eleven. In an interview with the weekly publication Cricket in 1902, Ahsan recalled that when he first played, he spoke little English, and when bowling was unable to say “How’s that, umpire?” He could only manage “Umpire?” In one game, the opposition captain, aware of this, instructed the umpire to refuse any appeal not addressed to him as “How’s that”, and so all of Ashan’s appeals were turned down that day.

By 1895, Ahsan was part of the school first team, but by his own recollection failed horribly, averaging just three with the bat. However, the pupils at the college took their cricket very seriously. Ahsan recalled in his interview with Cricket that the team had no formal coaching, but organised their own practices most days for around two-and-a-half hours, encouraging each other and identifying any flaws in their team-mates’ play which could be improved. He also noted that whenever they encountered an “English” team, they watched any good batters closely and afterwards tried to copy their strokes. By 1902, Ahsan related with obvious pride, Aligarh was one of the strongest teams in India.

According to Ahsan, he was initially a “very cramped” batter who crouched over his bat until a man he identified as “Dr Napier, a good hitter who, I was told, had played for some county in England” improved his technique by encouraging him to stand upright.

This culture of self-improvement and drawing inspiration from each other and from good players clearly had an enormous impact on Ahsan. By his second season in the first eleven, he was a much better batter and topped the college averages in both 1896 and 1897. Given that Aligarh played some prestigious teams, it was quite an improvement. Among his best innings — according to the feature in Cricket, presumably based on his own views — were scores of 52 in each innings against Patiala, 62 against the Agra Club and 53 against Allahabad Cricket Club. But he had also scored at least four centuries for Aligarh; against Meerut College, the Berreilly Club, Bulandshahr and the Tundla Club.

In 1898, Ahsan left Aligarh but was delighted when his father sent him to England, where he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, enrolling in October 1899 and being called to the bar in 1902. Contrary to some modern impressions, many of those studying to become barristers at the four Inns of Court came from all over the world; far from being exclusively white, Lincoln’s Inn — along with the other Inns of Court, as well as Oxford and Cambridge Universities — would have been very diverse. For example, roughly half of those admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in October 1899 alongside Ahsan were South Asian.

While studying law was difficult and expensive, Ahsan was delighted to have plenty of time to play cricket. One of his friends, the brother of Shaukat Ali (his former Aligarh captain) told Andrew Stoddart about him; the latter’s influence earned Ahsan membership of Hampstead Cricket Club. It was the beginning of a profitable association. In the 1900 season, he scored 1,160 runs for Hampstead (his average of 36.25 placed him sixth in the club averages) and a total of 1,459 in all cricket at an average of 38. This included three centuries, the highest of which was 153 for Hampstead against West Hertfordshire. In 1901, he scored a total of 1,965 runs at 38, with five centuries. His highest innings of 180 was scored for Hampstead against St Bartholomew’s’ Hospital. For his club, he was second to Stoddart in the averages with 1,349 runs at 47.

Andrew Stoddart in 1897 (Image: Wikipedia)

Again, it should not be assumed that Ahsan would have been the only South Asian cricketer playing on the London club scene. For example, one of his team-mates at Hampstead was called Mohammed Said. Further afield, Kanwar Singh played briefly for Cambridge and Kent in 1901 and 1902, and A. H. Mehta came to England in 1902 in an attempt to qualify for Lancashire. There were also West Indian cricketers in England such as Charles Ollivierre, and almost ten years after the peak of Ahsan’s club career, C. R. Browne and J. A. Veerasawmy opened the bowling for the Clapham Ramblers while both men were, like Ahsan, qualifying as barristers.

Nevertheless, the English cricket establishment viewed Indian cricketers with condescension. Fuelled by racist attitudes, many critics dismissed the possibility of an Indian — other than an English-educated “prince” such as Ranjitsinhji — excelling at cricket owing to various factors, including a supposed lack of sportsmanship, laziness, impatience and “over-excitement”. Such prejudices persisted for many years. For Ahsan to be accepted as he was by former Test players and some of the biggest names in English cricket meant overcoming these considerable obstacles placed in his way.

Ahsan did tell one story in Cricket which might hint at some of the issues he faced. Despite bearing little physical resemblance to Ranjitsinhji (who was at the height of his fame at this time), Ahsan was often mistaken for him when people saw him carrying cricket equipment. On one such occasion, as he was leaving a cricket ground, a small boy begged to be allowed to carry his bags to Liverpool Street Station. When they arrived there, Ahsan wanted to give him some money, but the boy refused and instead asked for his autograph. Ahsan did not think he was famous enough to be giving autographs, but obliged anyway. When the boy saw the signature, his jaw dropped and he exclaimed: “What, ain’t you Ranjitsinhji?”

Ahsan’s impressive record also came despite what he found was a big step up in terms of standard; he noted that in Indian cricket, bowlers often stopped trying to dismiss a batter once he passed fifty, but in England they kept coming at him. He enjoyed batting on considerably flatter wickets than those at home, but noticed that the fielding was much sharper. In fact, when he first played for Hampstead, Stoddart told him that he had to improve his ground fielding considerably.

Another development in his cricket was that he took up bowling. He was largely a part-timer in India but practised hard in England. He found that he could swing the new ball — a skill which was still in its infancy at the time, to the extent that neither he nor any other swing bowlers quite knew how they did it. Ashan had noticed, however, that the swing disappeared as the seam became worn down. He had even discussed the phenomenon with the former Test bowler Fred Spofforth, who played alongside him at Hampstead. But in club cricket, Ahsan was a handful, once taking the first five wickets at a low cost when playing Richmond. His record for Hampstead shows a steady improvement: 23 wickets at 14 in 1900; 58 wickets at 19 in 1901 (when he was the leading wicket-taker for the club, ahead of Spofforth) and 43 wickets at 13 in 1902.

But it was his batting which drew attention. By 1901, being qualified for Middlesex by residence, he was on the fringes of the county team. He played for Middlesex Second Eleven, and in one match scored 135 against Sussex Second Eleven in June. By August, he had made his first-class debut, playing for the MCC in a high-scoring draw against W. G. Grace’s London County. The opposition included Grace, Grace’s son Bertie and Billy Murdoch. Ahsan bowled eleven wicketless overs and conceded 71 runs before opening the MCC batting and scoring 10. If his performance was unremarkable, he at least had the distinction of becoming the first Muslim to play first-class cricket in England.

Ahsan was recorded on the 1901 census; on the night of the census, he was listed as a visitor at 100 Broadway Villas in Willesden, the home of the widowed Rebecca Samuels, whose family seem to have been merchants of some description. One curiosity is that Ahsan is listed as being a widower. While there is no indication elsewhere that he was married before this, there is not enough evidence to suggest that the census might be wrong. He was certainly married later and had at least three sons.

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The Middlesex team which played Sussex at Eastbourne in 1902. Back row: Lord Dalmeny, C. Headlam, A. E. Trott, J. T. Rawlin, J. T. Hearne. Middle row: R. W. Nicholls, P. F. Warner, W. P. Robertson, G. W. Beldam. Front row: C. J. B. Webb, Ahsan-ul-Haq.

After being called to the Bar in June 1902, Ahsan played three first-class matches for Middlesex in the County Championship, opening the batting with Pelham Warner in the first two. A record of 54 runs in five innings and two overs for 19 runs hardly set the world alight, but his performances for Hampstead meant that he had a growing reputation. In his last season at the club, he scored 752 runs at 36, to be fourth in the batting averages. The feature in Cricket said of him: “As a batsman he has a splendid eye, and his strokes are numerous; he has a very powerful drive which he makes without any apparent effort. If he had been able to remain in England, great things might have been expected of him.”

Despite his growing fame, he left England in September 1902 and returned to Jullunder to work as a barrister. Before his departure, he was presented with an engraved silver bowl by the Hampstead club to commemorate his connection with the team. It listed his playing record and had a message of “good luck”. A speech by S. S. Pawling played up the links between India and Britain, and said that he embodied the best qualities of both places: “Gentleness, kindliness, good comradeship, and sport. The present was not only in recognition of his skilful play but also of his qualities as a man and a comrade.” In total, he scored 3,210 runs for the club at 40 and took 121 wickets at 16.

Much of the rest of Ahsan’s life is lost to history. He makes occasional appearances in newspapers published in British India; for example, The Tribune, which was published in Lahore, recorded in 1908 that he had been installed as the “Worshipful Master of the Lodge” of freemasons at Jullundur. What made his election unusual, as the report pointed out, was that masters of the lodge were usually European. The Tribune also reported a meeting held in 1913 at which he was present which discussed the plight of Indians living in Canada at the time. From what little we know of him therefore, he could clearly fit into the society in which he lived — playing for Hampstead, Middlesex and becoming a masonic “Master” — but he seems to have been unafraid to speak out.

He also continued to play cricket, although not at first-class level. He played against the touring Oxford Authentics team in 1903 and several matches for an Aligarh College “Past and Present” team. The Civil and Military Gazette of Lahore reported that he played for the Maharaja of Kashmir’s team against “Mr Bosworth-Smith’s XI” in 1906. His name also appeared in the discussions surrounding several proposed but ultimately abandoned tours of England by Indian teams in this period. He was even suggested as a possibility for the one tour which did take place, in the 1911 season, but he was ultimately not selected.

There was, however, a surprising post-script to his cricket career. In March 1924, at the age of 45 (by when he was a judge based in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan), he was selected to take part in the Lahore Tournament. This was a competition modelled on the long-running Bombay Quadrangular. Ahsan captained the team known as “Muslims” (the other teams being “Sikhs”, “Europeans” and “Hindus”). Little information is readily available on these games, so while they are today recognised as first-class, it is uncertain how the participants would have viewed them. But such competitions appeared all around India, inspired by the popularity and keen cricket played in Bombay; as well as in Lahore, versions appeared in Sind, Karachi, Nagpur and Delhi. Matches could be controversial and were often hugely important to cricket followers.

For the first game, played against the “Sikhs”, Ahsan came out to bat at number eleven with his team already having scored 409 for nine. He proceeded to thrash a century in 40 minutes. He declared as soon as he reached three figures, having shared an unbroken tenth wicket partnership of 150 with Abdus Salaam. Ahsan did not bowl, being chosen purely for his captaincy (and presumably his experience). Little else is known of this incredible innings. But we can fill in some gaps.

In 1987, a letter from Ahsan’s son Manzoor-ul-Haq appeared in the Cricket Statistician, the quarterly publication of the Association of Cricket Statisticians. He remembered travelling with his father to the match by train, aged twelve. According to Manzoor, the train was late arriving which meant that his father could only bat at number eleven. Unfortunately, this cannot quite be true as Ahsan did not bat until the second morning and even if the team had played the first day with no captain, he batted at number ten in the next match and at number eleven when he played again the following season. Perhaps more reliable is Manzoor’s memory that the opposing captain, the Maharaja of Patiala, gave Ahsan a robe of gold thread in honour of his innings.

The match was drawn but the “Muslims” qualified for the final owing to their first innings lead. At the time of writing, Ahsan’s 40-minute century remains the second fastest of all time in first-class cricket in terms of the length of the innings by time (there is no record of how many deliveries he faced), after Percy Fender’s 35-minute innings and equal with Gilbert Jessop (there have been faster centuries in contrived circumstances, but these are usually excluded from official records). For the final against the “Hindus”, he promoted himself to number ten but scored only eight. However, he led his team to a four-wicket win.

His final first-class appearance came at the equivalent tournament twelve months later; having missed the semi-final win over the “Europeans” — perhaps this is where Manzoor’s train story might provide an explanation, if he did not play in the match because of a travel delay — he captained the “Muslims” in the final. Batting at number eleven again, he scored a duck but his team defeated the “Sikhs” by six wickets. He was left with a final first-class record of 172 runs at 21.50 in seven games. His 40-minute hundred was his only score over fifty at that level.

Ahsan’s name was occasionally recalled in later years, such as when Gilbert Jessop wrote about former Indian cricketers before the 1932 tour of England by India. He discussed the “Afghan” and “picturesquely-named” Ahsan, but lapsed into clumsy racial stereotyping by focussing on his poor fielding and telling an unlikely tale of when Ahsan allowed the ball to elude him in a Hampstead match, after which he supposedly said to Stoddart: “I am so sorry Mr Stoddart [which he would have had no reason to call him as a fellow amateur], but I am so damned lazy.”

We know nothing else of Ahsan’s life. From 1921 until his retirement in 1933, he was part of the Punjab Civil Service, working as a district and session judge. In 1937–38, he is recorded as the “Minister in Charge of the Legislative Department” and the Chief Justice for Bikaner State; he continued with the latter role until at least 1939. He died on 29th December 1957 in Lahore, which was then part of Pakistan.

Two of his sons, Inam-ul-Haq and Munawwar-ul-Haq played first-class cricket — the former before the Second World War and the latter after. We know that Munawwar was born in 1931, but no information is available for Inam. However, Munawwar was involved in Pakistan cricket for many years; in 1974–75, he negotiated on behalf of the Pakistan players in a pay dispute with Abdul Kardar, then the President of the Pakistan Cricket Board. In Wounded Tiger: A History of Cricket in Pakistan (2015), Peter Oborne speculates that Munawwar may have been motivated by his dislike of Kardar, whom he blamed for his omission from the Pakistan tour of England in 1954.

Note: Thanks to @tintin1107 for details of Ahsan’s later career via Twitter.

“Almost frightened to bowl at him”: Alletson’s Innings

Edwin Alletson in 1911 (Image: Cricket, 27 May 1911)

On 20 May 1911, an unremarkable journeyman cricketer played one of the most astonishing innings of all time. Ted Alletson’s career with Nottinghamshire comprised just 118 first-class matches between 1906 and 1914. He came from nowhere, and shortly afterwards faded back into obscurity. But one afternoon in Hove secured him a place in cricket history. For his contemporaries, and for those who wrote about it afterwards, the innings defied belief. How could one man do what he did? How could he score so easily and so quickly? Today, we find it easier to understand because T20 has rendered commonplace even the most rapid feats of scoring. But in 1911 such an innings was almost without parallel. And even in a modern game, the pace of scoring — and its ferocity — would be worth more than just a second glance.

Edwin Boaler Alletson had spent several years on the fringes of the Nottinghamshire team, playing regularly albeit with little notable success. Although some later accounts suggested otherwise, he always had a reputation as a big hitter, and scored quickly whenever his batting came off. But it very rarely did. Before the match that brought him fame, Alletson had played 72 first-class games for Nottinghamshire since his debut in 1906; in 106 innings, he had passed fifty just eight times, with a highest score of 81, scoring 1,768 runs at an average of 17.33.

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Hove cricket ground photographed around 1907

When Nottinghamshire travelled to Hove to play Sussex on 18, 19 and 20 May 1911, Alletson had only appeared in one of the county’s two games so far that season. He would not have played at Hove except that Tom Wass, one of Nottinghamshire’s main bowlers, was unfit. So Alletson began his 73rd first-class game with little reputation, and expectations cannot have been high.

Most of what we know about Alletson comes from John Arlott, better known as a commentator, who researched the man and his innings very thoroughly. He interviewed him at length by letter, and was able to tell his story thoroughly in an enjoyable little book called Alletson’s Innings, first published in 1957 and reprinted with extra material in 1991. Most of the following details come from that book.

The first two days passed without incident. Nottinghamshire scored 238 (Alletson 7) as E. H. Killick took five for 14. Killick was another unremarkable cricketer, albeit one who played in 344 consecutive County Championship matches for Sussex. Primarily a batsman, he was a useful slow bowler, taking 729 first-class wickets at 27.30, a relatively high average for the period.

Ernest Killick

Otherwise, Sussex had a reasonably good attack. The main bowler was the 36-year-old Albert Relf, a medium-paced off-break bowler who played for Sussex between 1900 and 1921 and in 13 Tests for England between 1903 and 1914. His career record was formidable: 25 Test wickets at 24.96 and 1,897 first-class wickets at 20.94. His younger brother Robert also played in the team, but was not quite in Albert’s class with the ball. In a 28-year career with Sussex, he took 317 wickets at 27.94 bowling brisk medium pace. The other main bowler was the 37-year-old George Cox, a slow-left-arm bowler who played for Sussex into his fifties, taking 1,843 wickets at an average of 22.86. And supporting them was George Leach, a fast bowler who took 413 wickets at an average of 27.94 in an eight-year career.

Killick top-scored with 81 when Sussex replied with a first innings total of 414. By the end of the second day, Nottinghamshire had scored 152 for three in their second innings, still 24 behind going into the last day. On the final morning, four wickets fell for five runs, leaving Nottinghamshire 185 for seven, only nine runs ahead and facing a heavy defeat.

Meanwhile, Alletson had been struggling with a wrist injury. That morning, he had gone for a swim before breakfast, despite less-than-sunny weather, which helped his wrist considerably. When the seventh wicket fell, fifty minutes before lunch, he went in to bat at number nine. By playing fairly orthodox cricket, Alletson scored 47 before the interval — which based on his previous scores over fifty was around his standard rate of scoring. He later recalled that his batting until lunch was “normal”. However, he had some luck. When his score was 25, he hit a ball from Albert Relf in the air but Reginald Heygate just failed to reach it at cover, having seen it too late. Then when he had reached 42, Cox dropped a difficult chance at slip.

These chances merely looked to have delayed Sussex, ending their hopes of wrapping things up by lunch. After Alletson had added 73 for the eighth wicket with Garnet Lee (who scored 26), two quick wickets fell to George Leach, the second one on the stroke of lunch so that the interval came with Nottinghamshire 260 for nine. The Relf brothers had taken five of the wickets to fall, Leach had taken three and Cox one.

With a lead of just 84, it seemed inevitable that Nottinghamshire would lose. Perhaps the spectators did not bother to return; certainly there were few journalists present to see what followed — probably only one.

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The Relf brothers. Left to right: Robert, Ernest and Albert, probably photographed around 1912 when Ernest, who did not play in Alletson’s match, made his Sussex debut.

During the lunch break, the Sussex captain Herbert Chaplin (who was injured and not actually taking part in the match, but watched from the pavilion) overheard Alletson ask Arthur Jones, his captain: “Mr Jones, does it matter what I do?” Jones replied: “No, Alletson. I don’t think it matters what you do.” To which Alletson responded: “Oh. Then I’m not half going to give Tim Killick some stick.” Meanwhile, the Sussex players confidently expected to win easily after lunch.

The next forty minutes became one of the most famous and extraordinary passages in cricket history. They also became one of the most closely analysed because the reported details afterwards did not quite add up; doubtless all those present were too caught up in the on-field events to record timings closely. This was unfortunate because, at the time, the speed of an innings was judged not on how many deliveries a batsman used to score his runs, but how many minutes. Matters were further complicated by the two scorers present at the game. The Sussex scorer recorded the runs scored, but did not keep a bowling analysis (which was usually recorded, even at that time). The Nottinghamshire scorer, Harry Coxon, did keep a bowling analysis but it contains several mistakes. Additionally, John Arlott observes that Coxon, a man in his sixties, could not reasonably have been expected to keep up with the hitting taking place on the field. Not only were his figures, unsurprisingly, a little untidy, he later traced over the original pencil with ink, making them even harder to read.

Nevertheless, Arlott, assisted by the statistician Roy Webber, went over the scorebooks in forensic detail and between them the two men reconstructed, ball-by-ball, the post-lunch section of the innings, correcting probable errors in the bowling analysis recorded by Coxon. Such an approach was rare in the 1950s, when they were working, but their results give the most accurate picture possible of Alletson’s innings.

Alletson going out to bat in the match immediately after the Sussex game, when he scored 60 against Gloucestershire at Bristol (Image: Daily Mirror, 27 May 1911)

The match resumed at 2:15pm; Alletson was out at 2:55pm. In that time, he had scored 142 runs. The contemporary reports state that Alletson took ten minutes to reach his fifty, fifteen minutes to move from 50 to 100, and a further fifteen minutes to score his final 89 runs. This was most likely pure guesswork from the reporter who had been too caught up in the action to look at the time until Alletson was out. Arlott points out several discrepancies in these timings based on the reconstruction — for example that the first six balls of the session would have taken ten minutes to bowl, whereas seven overs would have been bowled in the second fifteen minutes, which was impossible even at a time of rapid over-rates. He points out other problems, such as the time it would have taken to retrieve the ball after it had been hit for six, or the time taken to change around at the end of an over with men scattered all over the field. He also wonders if play resumed promptly at 2:15, or was delayed by five minutes or so. His conclusion is that Alletson must have scored even faster than the reported 142 runs in 40 minutes. But if the timings are wrong, that matters less to a modern audience who are more interested in how many deliveries he took.

The Arlott/Webber reconstruction suggests that the new batsman, William Riley, faced the four balls remaining from the over started before lunch. Alletson reached his fifty by striking his second ball of the session, bowled by Killick, for four. It took him a further 17 balls to reach his century (his first in first-class cricket), 16 more deliveries to reach 152 (which meant he scored 102 runs from 33 deliveries), and 16 deliveries to reach 189. In 51 balls after lunch, he scored 142 runs, including eighteen fours and eight sixes. Meanwhile, at the other end, Riley faced 19 balls for ten runs. The pair added 152 in 11.2 overs (plus two no-balls). Most of Alletson’s sixes were hit over mid-on; witnesses remembered the ball being struck onto or over the nearby skating rink, on the other side of the stands. Five balls were hit completely out of the ground and lost. Wisden recorded that two balls were hit over the stands.

Alletson farmed the strike very well, apart from one over where Riley scored a three from the last ball of an over of which he had faced the entirety (it may be questioned why they ran three, but perhaps reason had deserted everyone by this point; Riley took a single from the first ball of the next over to get off strike). Alletson, meanwhile, failed to score from just 12 of the deliveries he faced; four of these were consecutive balls from Albert Relf when Alletson had scored 162 (the next went for four).

As for his promise to target Killick: Alletson took nine from the first over he bowled after lunch, 22 from the second, eleven from the third, and 34 (46604446, including two no-balls) from his fourth. Killick’s spell was 4–0–77-0 (Riley scored a single from one of his overs). The 34 runs scored from the over was a record until Garry Sobers hit Malcolm Nash for six sixes in 1968. Ravi Shastri matched Sobers but only three other men have equalled Alletson in the history of first-class cricket. The figures of the other bowlers were: Leach 3.4–0–43–0, Albert Relf 2–0-21–0 and Cox 1.4–0–11–1. After Leach had completed his over to Riley, 120 came from the next seven overs until Relf and Cox replaced Leach and Killick; the next 3.4 overs resulted in a more sedate 32 runs.

Alletson batting in the match immediately after the Sussex game, when he scored 60 against Gloucestershire at Bristol (Images: Daily Mirror, 27 May 1911)

The carnage ended when Alletson was caught on the straight boundary off Cox for 189. The brothers George and John Gunn, who played for Nottinghamshire, saw that the catcher, the Sussex acting-captain Charles Smith, had his foot and head pressed against the stand when he held the catch and so it should have been not-out; but although they told Smith — who agreed that it was not a fair catch — Alletson still came off as he knew time was running out and Nottinghamshire now had an opportunity to win. In total, he had batted for around 90 minutes, hitting eight sixes and 23 fours in that time.

Sussex, rather than the easy win that looked likely at lunchtime, needed to score 237 in 195 minutes. After the Sussex openers Robert Relf and Joe Vine scored 112 in the first 75 minutes, five wickets fell for nine runs. The score continued to mount, but with ten minutes remaining, and Sussex still needing 25 runs, the eighth wicket fell, and the batsmen batted out the draw. Riley, the anonymous partner in Alletson’s rampage, took four wickets.

As the dust settled, everyone began to realise what they had just witnessed. Wisden’s match report was restrained, simply saying: “A phenomenal display of driving on the part of Edward [sic] Alletson rendered this match memorable.” But the very fact that Wisden used the first name of a professional cricketer — even if the writer got it wrong — in a match report was extraordinary in itself, and indicated the historic nature of what took place. It added that he hit with “extraordinary power and freedom”.

The newspapers — despite the limited journalistic presence at the match — widely covered the innings. Alletson became (almost literally) a nine-day wonder. None of the reports were able to give too much detail, but the headlines were clear. For example, the Daily Mirror had a brief feature under a large photograph of Alletson, and a prominent headline: “Alletson Scores 142 Runs in 40 Minutes: Jessop Outdone by the Notts Cricketer”. The Referee had the headline “Sensational Batting”, and a longer report, but one which was limited to the standard (and inaccurate) timings of the innings. And for many weeks afterwards, Alletson was followed closely in the hope he would repeat his feats.

In Cricket, R. S. Holmes cautioned about expecting too much on the basis of one innings, no matter how remarkable, but wryly suggested that Alletson could expect every bat manufacturer in the country to send him their bats to endorse. In fact, Alletson stuck with the bat which had served him so well, and after his playing days, kept it displayed above his fireplace at home. And in another section of that issue of Cricket, a writer unearthed an innings by Gilbert Jessop during which he had arguably scored faster. But this involved a little statistical manipulation. Jessop had scored 191 out of 234 in 90 minutes for the Gentlemen of the South against the Players of the South in 1907; this was technically faster than Alletson’s 189 out of 227, but did not take into account that 142 of Alletson’s runs came in 40 minutes.

The same writer, somewhat grumpily, stated that Alleton’s feats had been “excelled many times” in minor cricket. In contrast to modern cricket, where every latest achievement is hailed as the greatest of all time, cricket writers contemporary to Alletson believed that their sport was in more-or-less permanent decline.

The surviving participants in the match told Arlott their memories. All Alletson said was: “After lunch, A. O. Jones told me to have a go, as I did. Runs kept coming and I cast care aside and hit harder.” He remembered landing five balls on the roof of the skating rink.

Robert Relf remembered that he “hit like a giant”. He said that Alletson:

“…had one of those days where everything comes off. He just hit firm-footed. He made no attempt to get to the pitch of the ball, but, unless it was right up to him, hit under it, straight off the middle of the bat. Fortunately, I suppose, I didn’t bowl at him, but I was out at long-off and some of his dries were carrying as far as the hotel or over the stand to the skating-rink. Once or twice he played cuts — or perhaps you could call them short-arm jabs — away on the off side, but most of the time he was hitting between long on and deep extra-cover. My brother Albert, Joe Vine, George Leach and myself were fielding out there, but, even while he scored at the rate he did, nothing came to hand to any of us.”

Relf concluded: “My chief memory is that shower of cricket balls going over the boundary and the crowd mad with delight. Of course, it cost us a match we were winning, but I don’t think anybody minded about that — it was such an experience to watch it.”

George Gunn recalled one cut over point that “smashed the pavilion window and wrecked the bar. He sent his drives skimming; you could hear them hum.” Gunn also recalled the Relf brothers and Vine fielding in the deep. Gunn, who was watching from the boundary as it became clear Alletson was doing something remarkable, called to Vine: “Look out, he’ll hit you one any minute now.” To which Vine replied: “**** him, I don’t want it!” Gunn also said that several of Alletson’s drives went straight through the Relf brothers “as if they were ghosts”.

Headline from the Daily Mirror, 22 May 1911

George Gunn’s brother John also remembered the innings: “Ted almost murdered Ernie Killick, until Ernie was almost frightened to bowl at him. I do not think he minded his bowling being hit so much as he was worried that Ted might hit one back at him.”

Cyril Foley, a former cricketer, army officer and archaeologist, wrote about the innings, which he claimed to have seen, in his memoirs, Autumn Foliage, in 1935. Some of his memories are a little suspect. He recalled a delay while the ball had to be prised out of the wood of one of the stands; he also suggested another ball was recovered from the beach (roughly a mile away), and how a small boy was later found playing with “a practically new ball” he had discovered in the streets outside the ground. The final claim is perhaps less preposterous than the first two.

A more lasting measure of the impact of Alletson’s innings is in the record books. In the years when cricket statistics were not as extensive as they are now, there was no real record of the fastest century or fastest fifty in first-class cricket. Instead, Wisden simply had a section on “Fast Scoring” which listed individual feats but not who was the fastest to each milestone. For many years, Alletson’s innings held pride of place until a more methodical record-keeping approach was adopted, but even then he remained a foot-note.

In the aftermath of the game, the press recorded that the Alletson’s former employer, the Duke of Portland, presented him with £100, which he had promised him when he scored his first century for Nottinghamshire. Alletson remembered slightly differently in a letter to Arlott: that the Duke gave him “a gold watch and guard, and a medal with [an] inscription”. And Alletson’s version seems more likely as the newspapers reported in January that the Duke had presented these items at the annual dinner of the Welbeck Sports Club. His father, more prosaically, sent him a “home fed ham” which, Alletson wistfully remarked to Arlott, would have been a nice present in the more austere times of 1956.

There are a few other points to consider that have arisen since the time that Arlott was writing. At the time, the notion of a batsman’s strike rate was unheard of, but this measure shows just how extraordinary this century was. Just taking the portion of his innings scored after lunch (142 runs from 51 balls), his strike rate was 278.43 runs per 100 balls. In modern cricket, particularly during shorter innings, this figure is good but not remarkable. However, even today, few T20 centuries are scored at this rate. For example, in a list of the highest T20 individual scores, only two innings exceeding 115 have been achieved at a higher strike-rate than Alletson’s post-lunch feats at the time of writing. More comparable would be two innings played in One Day Internationals, 149 from 44 balls by A. B. de Villiers for South Africa against the West Indies in 2015 and Corey Anderson’s 131 from 47 balls for New Zealand against the West Indies in 2014.

We can also make some other comparisons. After lunch, Alletson took 33 deliveries to score 100 runs. Only two T20 centuries have been scored more quickly at the time of writing; in “List A” one-day matches, only A. B. de Villiers, in the innings already mentioned, has scored a century from fewer deliveries. Comparisons with first-class cricket are probably fairer. The fastest official first-class century in terms of balls faced (ignoring instances that were contrived with the help of the opposing team) was scored from 34 balls by David Hookes in 1982. The fastest in terms of time was 35 minutes (between 40 and 46 balls) by Percy Fender in 1921. We do not know how many balls Alletson’s own century took, but as he batted relatively slowly before lunch, it would not have beaten either Hookes or Fender; but these numbers provide a useful comparison. We can be certain that his rate of scoring after lunch remains almost unparalleled in first-class cricket, even in the modern era of big bats and six-hitting.

However, if Alletson touched heights that even today are rare for the best batsmen to reach, he was not like modern T20 specialists because this was a one-off. He never scored another first-class century. It was an innings in which he got lucky, and scored almost entirely from huge drives. Modern batsmen play many more shots to achieve their scoring rates, and are capable of reproducing them day after day. In that sense, we cannot say that Alletson matched the scoring feats of cricket today. But for one afternoon, this anonymous professional provided the cricket world with a glimpse of the future.

The rest of his life did not match these heights, but as we shall see, Alletson’s story is no less interesting for that…