Death of David Harris — Hambledon's Greatest Bowler Dies at Crookham, May 1803

Harris had been the senior figure of the Hambledon attack alongside the slow left-armer Lumpy Stevens for fifteen years. By 1798 the club itself was finished as a major force; its membership had collapsed from 52 in 1791 to 16 in 1796 and its last formal meeting in 1796 recorded only that 'no Gentlemen were present.'

Through the late 1790s Harris was crippled by gout but kept playing as long as Hambledon could field a side. After his last match in 1798 he returned permanently to his Crookham potter's wheel. Friends visited him in retirement and reported that he could no longer raise his bowling arm above the level of his hip.

Harris was born at Elvetham, Hampshire, in 1755 and worked as a potter. He came into Hambledon's first eleven in the early 1780s and within five years was the most-feared bowler in England. His action — high for an underarm bowler, the ball lifted out of the hand from a level above the waist — produced unprecedented bounce and speed off rough pitches. John Nyren's celebrated portrait of him, written thirty years later for The Cricketers of My Time, called him 'masculine, erect and appalling' and said no batsman of any era had faced anything like him. By the mid-1790s gout had begun to cripple him. He continued to play, latterly bringing an armchair onto the field and sitting between deliveries to spare his swollen joints. His last major match was for All-England against Surrey at Lord's Old Ground on 13-15 August 1798, by which time the Hambledon Club itself was on the verge of dissolution. He retired to Crookham, lived as a potter, and died on 19 May 1803. He was buried at the parish church at Crondall, two miles from Crookham, but no tombstone was erected and the precise location of his grave has been lost. His death was scarcely noted by the metropolitan press; the great Hambledon era had already ended in spirit some years before.

“His attitude when about to deliver the ball was masculine, erect, and appalling. First of all, he stood like a soldier at drill, upright. Then with a graceful and elegant curve, he raised the fatal ball to his forehead, and drawing back his right foot, started off with his left.”

“He was the only bowler I ever played whose balls would go through the centre of the bat.”

Harris's death was overshadowed by the Napoleonic War, then at its most acute, and by the slow rise of the new MCC-centred cricket. By the time John Nyren came to write his memoir in 1832, Harris had been thirty years dead but the old bowler's name was still spoken with awe by the surviving Hambledon men. Nyren's chapter on him — five pages of close, admiring prose — is the principal record of Harris's bowling that survives.