County File: Kent's past underpinned by splendid batsmen, spinners and, above all, wicketkeepers

This is part seven of Scyld Berry's life and times of county cricket series. You can read the rest of the series here

Like a ship in Chatham dockyard, Kent’s 150th celebrations were launched in style on March 4 in the nave of Canterbury Cathedral. Attended by 800 people, it was a lovely occasion by all accounts - although none that I have seen pointed out the irony in the choice of setting.

A roll of honour, mentioning all the great and good cricketers who have represented Kent, was sung as a psalm by the choir. And the county’s past, present and future deserve to be celebrated, even if this season is the first unplayed since 1945. “Thou art good Kent,” the Bard said verily in King Lear.

The thanksgiving service in Canterbury Cathedral was not tainted with anything so vulgar as statistics, but a few will support the contention that the cricket fields of Kent have been as fertile as those of any other shire. The two essentials being sunshine and space, the south-east is the driest region of England, and Kent spreads all of 80 miles from Dover to London, without any massive conurbations or mountains in between - just the towns, suburbs and villages which can accommodate a cricket field.

The top all-time achievers in first-class cricket are bound to be those who played county cricket in the period between 1890 and 1990, when a player could easily enjoy 30 games a season. Given these parameters, no county - no first-class team in the world - can match Kent in all departments. 

Of the 27 leading run-scorers in first-class cricket, three came from Kent in Frank Woolley, Colin Cowdrey (Lord Cowdrey eventually), and Les Ames. Of the 30 leading wicket-takers, five came from Kent in Tich Freeman, Colin Blythe, Derek Underwood, Doug Wright and Woolley again. Of the 20 leading wicketkeepers, four came from Kent in Alan Knott, Fred Huish, Godfrey Evans and Ames again. To boot, the only fielder to have caught 1000 catches is Woolley.

The style has matched the statistics. Running through the annals of Kent has been a yearning to be the most dashing or gallant or cavalier of all the counties - even more so than Hampshire, whose swashbuckling captains have usually had a dour medium-pacer to give them control. This is not to say that Underwood would float the ball up outside offstump and say hit me, for Kent has had its leavenings of earthy professionals. But that yearning has always existed, and it led to a schism, one which evoked a famous scene in Canterbury Cathedral. 

Kent have enjoyed two golden ages - at the end of the Edwardian era, when they won the championship four times, and the 1970s, when they won it twice along with various limited-overs trophies. In both of these eras they had batsmen who would charge like knights in shining armour, whether Mr KL Hutchings (as the scorecards termed him, not “Ken”) and Frank Woolley, or Asif Iqbal and Colin Cowdrey.

Dashing batsmanship has been difficult on the slow seamers at Canterbury in recent years (they have enabled Darren Stevens, at wobbling medium-pace, to take 215 first-class wickets at 25 there, after six wickets at 67 for Leicestershire). Yet the spirit is still willing: for Hutchings read Sam Billings, the present captain, who must be a jolly good egg to play under. As proof of their morale, orchestrated by Billings as zestful captain and wicketkeeper, Kent’s fielding is as good as any side in the land.

As part of Kent’s campaign to maximise the county’s resources, under the title of Raising Standards, the groundsman who produced belters at Beckenham has transferred to the St Lawrence ground, Adrian Llong. So the subliminal message behind the slogan may soon come clearly into focus, and Kent’s batsmen will again lower their visors, raise their standards and charge down the pitch to cover-drive.

Even now, two of England’s specialist batsmen come from Kent. Joe Denly has done his holding job well at number three, although he seemed to be going through a mini-crisis of confidence by the end of the South Africa tour. Having started in Test cricket with dashing cover-drives, he gradually dropped down to first gear by Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg, rather than settling on a tempo in between.

Last winter Zak Crawley grew - although he started at 6’ 5” - in leaps and bounds. At the start of the South Africa tour he flapped at short balls; by the fourth Test in Johannesburg he was nailing his hooks. Anyone who can learn so quickly on the job, and bring such a calm temperament to bear on opening a Test innings aged 21, has a long future ahead, though it might be in Denly’s place at number three.

Last year Kent were widely expected to go straight back down into the second division but finished fourth in the first. Here was proof that they are making much of their resources under a newly created director of cricket, Paul Downton, who had kept wicket for them in his youth before accepting he was not going to displace the incumbent. This was Alan Knott, who would still be the wicketkeeper-batsman for England’s All-time Test XI in the eyes of many selectors; he might even keep Adam Gilchrist out of the World’s All-time XI if the match v Mars were to be staged on an uncovered pitch (not that rain would be expected in the away fixture).

Splendid batsmen and spinners and above all wicketkeepers: Kent has added lustre to England’s inventory. Not so much fast bowlers: they have therefore shopped shrewdly for those who were not household names, and by bringing Harry Podmore from Middlesex and Matt Milnes from Nottinghamshire, they found a pair of pace bowlers who took more than 50 wickets each last season and kept them in the first division.

Kent’s league structure seems sound: ten clubs, five of them inside the M25, so their portion of South-east London is not ignored. Their wish to be diverse, and relevantly so, is evident in their registration of the Afghan offspinner who had briefly played for Derbyshire, Hamidullah Qadri: and their T20 signing was to have been Mohammad Nabi. Given Kent’s proximity to Calais and the size of their Afghan community, this is clever, both as cricket and marketing.

Kent’s men have won the county championship six times, Kent’s women eight times since 2006. Charlotte Edwards did nothing but advance the reputation of the county’s batsmanship, and Tammy Beaumont follows in her wake. Kent’s commitment to their development of women’s cricket is apparent, according to Downton, “in the way the county delivers a similar age-group development programme to both boys and girls, the growth in women’s sections in club cricket, and in a women-only introductory league playing indoor soft-ball cricket.”

“The county is very proud of the success of the Kent women’s team, particularly in recent years,” Downton adds. “As part of our 150th celebrations, we are retrospectively awarding county caps to 45 Kent women going back to our first match in 1937.”

Influence of Lord Harris lives on in modern attitudes

The ancient landscape of county cricket has altered remarkably little. Once was a hierarchy called “the Big Six”; now it consists of counties which have Test match grounds. The northern shires of Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire have been omnipresent, so too Middlesex and Surrey, but since the First World War Warwickshire have replaced Kent as one of the six main counties, not least because Edgbaston is more of an international venue than Canterbury.

Kent owed their primacy, in the original Big Six, to Lord Harris. Rob Key was a fine captain of Kent, keeping them buoyant when insolvency threatened, and he has become one of the best of the younger generation of television commentators. But Kent’s most influential captain has to be Lord Harris. He was the eminence grise of English cricket: no eminence indeed has ever been grisier. After Eton and Oxford, he captained not only Kent but England in the inaugural Test in England in 1880: not even WG Grace was going to displace Harris.

Harris established his moral authority in two ways in which we still feel his influence. The first was that he went a long way to curb throwing by telling Lancashire that Kent would honour their fixture against them at Canterbury in 1885, and would prepare the ground and send umpires out to stand, but Kent would not put an eleven into the field - unless Lancashire excluded their two bowlers widely suspected of chucking. The Red Rose wilted and backed down in the face of Harris.

The second way was that Harris, being kindly paternalistic, conceded that a professional who could not get into his county team had the right to switch to another county and thereby earn a living. But he deplored the county that lured an established player away from another county. The same attitude prevails to this day, codified in regulations, although the two-year residential qualification has gone. 

Who else chaired the meeting in 1909 which launched the ICC, or Imperial Cricket Conference as it originally was, consisting of England, Australia and South Africa? A bit of a stickler, Harris was not the finest Governor of the Bombay Presidency which the Raj sent to India - he would carry on playing cricket in Poona while riots raged in Bombay - yet there is still a major schools tournament played in Mumbai for the Harris Shield.

Harris was so keen on promoting the sport worldwide - or rather within the Empire - that when the ICC expanded from the original three countries to include India, New Zealand and West Indies, who should again chair the meeting in 1926? Don’t suppose he would have approved of the new supermarket at St Lawrence, as part of the ground development which saved Kent’s finances, but maybe he would have grudgingly accepted it. Or he might even have been the chairman of Sainsbury’s. After all, another player on the Kent staff, Ian MacLaurin, became the chairman of Tesco.

Frank Woolley: Among the most beautiful of batsmen

Kent’s soil has nurtured some of England’s finest cricketers, without a doubt, but they have tended to be viewed through rose-coloured spectacles. The batsman who excels in the Garden of England acquires a more lustrous reputation than his counterpart at Cardiff or Derby.

The first line of that roll of honour which was sung like a Psalm listed the “Lion of Kent”. Alfred Mynn, by my reading, was the first cricketer who could walk into the England dressing-room of today - well, not today, whenever they next assemble - and look the players in the eye physically. Mynn was positively Flintoffian, a giant for the early Victorian era, according to the description by Fuller Pilch, the only other player to be mentioned in the Psalm’s first line: “six feet two, and near upon eighteen stone, all bone and muscle”, and Mynn was also blessed with enormous hands so that he caught flies and bowled leg-cutters: “You remember when the ground was a little hard, how Alfred would drop her short, and the ball would cut right across from the on to the off, and hum like a top.”

Of all the Kent cricketers to have been lionised, however, Frank Woolley ranks first, above Mynn or Colin Blythe or Colin Cowdrey; and he must have been one of the most beautiful of all batsmen, being slightly taller than David Gower but otherwise similar. Not least, both gave the impression that they stroked the ball, when their wristwork hit it fiercely hard.

Of all critics, Sir Neville Cardus rhapsodised about Woolley the most eloquently, especially when he batted against Ted Macdonald, the fast bowler for Australia then Lancashire. “It must have been thrilling to see Spofforth bowling at Grace, Lockwood bowling at Ranjitsinhji. But let us be just to our own day’s glories; Macdonald bowling at Woolley was a sight not less grand than any ever seen on a cricket field; the mirrors of the cricketers’ heaven will reflect it for ever.”

“He knows not the meaning of crisis; cricket is always the carefree meadow game with a beautiful name when Woolley plays,” Cardus added. And does therein lie the rub? Woolley averaged 36 in Tests, and only 33 against Australia when England needed him most (Hobbs, his direct contemporary, averaged 54 against Australia). “Knows not the meaning of crisis”: for certain Woolley was up with the pace of the fastest bowlers, as was Jack Hobbs and very few others, but he was bowled 30 times in his 91 Test innings, a very high proportion for any batsman. In Tests he was bowled 13 times in single figures, which suggests a penchant for strokeplay early in his innings, leaving a gap between bat and pad.

Raymond Robertson-Glasgow was more judicious in his appreciation of Woolley, after bowling to him for Somerset: “Frank Woolley was easy to watch, difficult to bowl to, and impossible to write about. When you bowled to him there weren’t enough fielders; when you wrote about him there weren’t enough words... The only policy was to keep pitching the ball up, and hope. He could never be properly described as being ‘set’ since he did not go through the habitual processes of becoming set… He jumped to his meridian.”

Cardus was so taken with the Kentish style of cricket because it came at the opposite extreme to the Lancastrian. Thus: “cricket is always a game for Kent, rarely a penitential labour.” Cardus defines a true Kent captain as “keen, chivalrous, and always in love with the game.” After Lancashire’s away match in 1926 - “the Dover field is tucked away in hills along which Lear must have wandered on his way to the cliffs” - Cardus wrote: “To my dying day I shall remember gratefully these afternoons in Kent, afternoons full of the air and peaceful sunshine of England.” 

Robertson-Glasgow was less romantic, more critical. “Myself, I preferred to watch him (Woolley) or play against him on some ground not in Kent. Praise and pride in home-grown skill are natural and right; but at Canterbury, in the later years, these had degenerated into a blind adulation that applauded his strokes with a very tiresome lack of discrimination.” Here was another warning: this yearning for cavalier style could get out of hand.

An unparalleled tradition of wicketkeepers

When I traced the lineage of Kent wicketkeepers in “Cricket: the Game of Life”, I called it “cricket’s longest-running tradition”, and have subsequently seen no reason to revise it. Every first-class county has produced some excellent keepers; and whole seasons have elapsed at Canterbury without a supreme exponent. But starting in 1744 with the first wicketkeeper of note, and continuing until Geraint Jones - albeit he came from Queensland - and Billings, Kent have produced more outstanding stumpers than any other team in the world.

Their pioneer went by the surname of Kips, or sometimes Kipps, his first name unrecorded. He kept wicket for Kent in their immortal match at the Honourable Artillery Ground in 1744 - immortal in that it inspired the first extant match report, albeit in verse. We know from a prosaic footnote in James Love’s poem that “Kips is particularly remarkable for handing (sic) the ball at the wicket, and knocking up the stumps instantly, if the Batsman is not extremely cautious.” And from an incomplete scorecard of this match between Kent and the Rest of England, we know that Kips did not concede a bye - rare in a two-innings match then or any other period - and made a stumping. So Kent is the county of hops and Kips.

The first keeper of note to round-arm bowling, not least Mynn’s, was Ned Wenman from Benendon. But he did not throw himself around like a modern keeper. If the ball was heading down legside, it kept on going down legside until it reached the long-stop, which was a specialist position. As Lord Harris described Wenman in “A Few Short Runs”: he “used gloves, I believe, little thicker than lined dogskin, and did not pretend to take every ball.”

Fuller Pilch remembered: “Just think of Ned Wenman behind a wicket: was there ever a better? He didn’t stop every ball, or every other ball perhaps, for he left his long-stop to do his own work. ‘What’s the good of Mr Walter Mynn for long-stop if I am to do all his work and knock my hands to pieces? No, let him do his work, and I will do mine.’”

Long-stop was no sinecure on grounds which had not been rolled; Lord Harris himself took pride in recalling it used to be his specialist position and that twice in one season he had run out batsmen at the far end. Wicketkeeping gloves seem to have appeared during Wenman’s 30-year career; being skilled at manual labour, as a carpenter, he made his own pair.

Another feature of Kent’s keepers is that most have been good batsmen, as they should have been. Hours of watching the ball intently, and moving quickly, will condition the youngster to bat as well as keep. So many of England’s best batsmen nowadays have kept wicket in their youth, from Jos Buttler and Jonny Bairstow to Rory Burns and Ollie Pope.

Not surprisingly, the first wicketkeeper to score a Test 50 came from Kent: Edward Tylecote, who achieved it in the 12th of all Tests. So too the first keeper to score a Test 100: Harry Wood, in the 37th. The trouble is that Lord Harris let Wood go: a Dartford boy who had trials with Kent, Wood left to play for Surrey after Harris decided he preferred Tylecote. Only Tylecote became too busy teaching maths and collecting butterflies for county cricket.

Never mind. Soon enough Fred Huish came along, to become the first - and only - keeper to make 100 dismissals in a first-class season before the First World War; and there he still is, sixth in the all-time list of keepers with the most dismissals. Old Fred still holds the world record for most stumpings in a first-class match - nine against Surrey in 1911 - and comes second only to another Kent keeper for most stumpings in a career, 377 to Les Ames’s 418.

“Role-models,” says Paul Downton, when asked to explain this Kent tradition; and undoubtedly this is a major factor. He kept wicket because his father George kept wicket, brilliantly too: he was an amateur who did not want to play for a living but still had ten games for Kent when Godfrey Evans was representing England.

But there must also be some environmental reason, or circumstance, which I reckon is this: Kent have had some of the finest spinners who have turned the ball away from the bat. Of the five to take 2000 wickets - Colin Blythe, Frank Woolley, Tich Freeman, Doug Wright and Derek Underwood - Freeman and Wright were leg- or wrist-spinners, the others orthodox left-arm. You have to be a top-class keeper to catch all those outside edges and effect all those stumpings, especially on uncovered pitches. When Huish made his nine stumpings, Kent used three bowlers, all of them spinners who turned their stock ball away from the righthander.

These five spinners, in addition, bowled many overs at Canterbury from the pavilion end and therefore had the specific, local, advantage of turning the ball down the steepest slope at an English county ground other than Lord’s. In addition, Kent have always played more games at outgrounds than most counties - still Beckenham and Tunbridge Wells - with their more natural pitches which are inclined to break up for spinners. Tich Freeman took more than 100 first-class wickets at eight separate grounds in Kent.

All elite cricketers are ahead of their time in some way: this is what makes them elite. I wish Fred Huish had written a book, like his contemporary keepers Arthur Lilley and Herbert Strudwick, but no. One trick which we like to think of as modern was practised by old Fred: when the ball ran loose on the legside and the Australian batsmen tried a single, in Kent’s game against the tourists in 1902, Huish kicked the ball on to the stumps at the bowler’s end for a run-out.

Les Ames raised the bar so high as a wicketkeeper/batsman that it is only in the last couple of decades that the game has caught up. Jonny Bairstow has averaged 34 with the bat in Tests for England, Jos Buttler 31, Matt Prior 40, and Alec Stewart 39. Ames averaged 40 too. The only people to have done the wicketkeeper’s double of 1000 runs and 100 wickets in a first-class season are Ames, three times, and John Murray, once.

Ames, it has to be said, conceded more than his share of byes - about 16 per Test - because he was not a fan of diving down the legside and getting his flannels dirty (professionals had to pay for their own laundry). Godfrey Evans altered the parameters, in one fell and famous swoop. In the 1954-5 Test at Melbourne, when Frank Tyson was bowling downwind, and like it, the lefthander Neil Harvey glanced down the legside and Evans, in leaping and catching him one-handed, raised the roof and the bar. No more need for longstops! 

Alan Knott did not attend the Cathedral thanksgiving: retiring to Cyprus indicated how much he valued privacy. In the lineage of Kent’s wicketkeepers, as the finest of them, he was yet an original. The last hour or more before bed-time was devoted to organising all his kit for the morrow. He did not have soft gloves but hammered a dent in the middle of them for hour after hour, in which the ball would lodge. He has very long fingers: indeed he joined the Kent staff as much for his offspin.

As flexible as a porpoise, and wary of his diet ahead of his time, Knott raised the standard in the amount of ground he could cover: whereas Evans had gone for that Ashes-winning catch down legside, Knott leaped for everything outside off or leg. The crowning glory came when he kept to Derek Underwood on a wet pitch. They did not exchange signs: Knott read the cues astutely enough as Underwood ran in, feet splayed, to know whether it would be the spinner that turned and bounced or the arm-ball which detonated legstump out of the ground. Ames, when watching as Kent’s manager, would sigh and remember his liaisons with Tich Freeman.

The schism of 1984

Cardus identified the two traditions or cultures within Kent cricket as the realistic and idealistic. Usually they have combined in the dressing-room. In the 1980s, instead of being a creative tension, it exploded into schism, if we may borrow an ecclesiastical term from Canterbury Cathedral.

Christoper Cowdrey represented this idealistic tradition. He came with all the qualifications: born of the imperial purple as the son of Colin; the godson of Peter May, the former England captain; and Tonbridge School. Dashing, up-and-at ‘em officer-class, in the cavalry of course.

Chris Tavare represented the realistic tradition. Sevenoaks  - not so grand as Tonbridge - and Oxford, but nothing flamboyant. When selected for England, Tavare put on a hair shirt and blocked; but he was a Test cricketer of substance, whereas Cowdrey played his handful of Tests as a bit of a breeze. To a northern outsider, this rivalry must have looked like the difference between posh and ultra-posh; yet it split the county. Who should captain? The old pros, Knott and Underwood, backed Tavare; the committee, which was outright “ra”, backed Cowdrey.

One should not push this parallel too far... yet the setting in both cases was Canterbury.

In 1984, 714 years after Thomas a Becket was murdered by King Henry II’s knights beside the stairs leading to the crypt, Tavare was dispatched, after doing his duty - indeed for doing his duty. ‘Tav’ had something of a saintly disposition; and Becket was found to have worn a hair shirt under his robes. Tavare at least survived, but left for Somerset, to join his best Oxonian friend Vic Marks.

“Many considered it unfortunate that at the end of a second successive season of marked improvement in Kent’s fortunes the decision was made to sack Tavare,” Wisden proclaimed. “He had done much to restore Kent’s prowess in all forms of cricket and scarcely deserved, on the evidence of his two seasons in command, to lose his job. He is succeeded by Christopher Cowdrey, so the captaincy changes hands for the sixth time since 1972 when Cowdrey’s father, Colin, who had reigned peacefully for 15 years, was succeeded by Mike Denness. Changing the captaincy again may not necessarily put Kent back on the winning path.”

You can say that again. Having been the county side of the 1970s, Kent did not win another trophy in the C20th, in spite of having some serious cricketers, like Mark Benson and Steve Marsh, the late Graham Dilley and Richard Ellison, and overseas players like Carl Hooper. Indeed, since that schism in 1984, they have won a total of two limited-overs trophies.

Today the blood has dried and been erased. The thanksgiving ceremony took place without reference to the murder in the Cathedral or at St Lawrence. Indeed a Henry was Kent’s hero in their promotion into the first division, albeit Matt from New Zealand, not the King. Everyone pulls together now under Billings, who combines the idealistic and realistic traditions. Yes, Kent, thou art good.