Alfred Mynn — The Lion of Kent's Final Season, 1859

Mynn had been a national figure since the mid-1830s, sometimes single-handedly carrying Kent. By 1859 he was 52, suffering from diabetes and declining health, and outclassed by the new generation of fast bowlers led by Jackson and Willsher.

The 1857 and 1858 seasons saw Mynn play less and less; his appearances were essentially ceremonial. The 1859 season was his last competitive cricket. He was already known to be ill.

Alfred Mynn was born at Goudhurst in Kent in January 1807 and played first-class cricket from 1832 to 1859 — 213 matches across 28 seasons. He bowled fast roundarm with an action that approached the legal limit of the day; his deliveries were said to be lethal on rough pitches and to have broken bats and bones. With the bat he was a powerful hitter, scoring 4,955 runs at 13.42, with a highest score of 125 not out. He was the central figure of the Kent side that, with Fuller Pilch, Nicholas Felix and the wicket-keeper Ed Wenman, won the Champion County title repeatedly in the late 1830s and early 1840s. By the late 1850s his health was declining, the legacy in part of a near-fatal 1836 leg injury that he had refused to allow to be amputated. He played his last regular cricket in 1859 and died on 1 November 1861 at the age of 54, of diabetes, at his brother Walter's house in Newington. The press of his day rated him alongside Pilch as the dominant cricketers of the second quarter of the nineteenth century. As a member of the Leeds and Hollingbourne Volunteers — a Territorial Army forerunner — he received a military funeral at Thurnham, Kent.

“He was a fast round-arm bowler of huge frame and equable temper, the most popular cricketer of his time.”

Mynn's death two years later, in November 1861, prompted one of the most famous obituary tributes in nineteenth-century English literature — William Jeffrey Prowse's 'Old Alfred Mynn' verses. The Kent of Mynn-Pilch-Felix did not recover its standing for the rest of the century; the county would not be a leading side again until the 1900s.