Nicholas Wanostrocht Publishes Felix on the Bat — 1845

Cricket literature before 1845 was thin: Nyren's 1833 Young Cricketer's Tutor was a memoir as much as a manual, and the Lillywhites' guides were primarily fixture lists and laws. There was no work that addressed batting technique in detail with illustrations.

Felix had been writing for the cricket press through the late 1830s and had begun lecturing on batting at his school. The catapulta, patented in 1837, gave him a means of practising that he wanted to share with a wider audience.

Wanostrocht was the proprietor of a school in Camberwell, an accomplished amateur painter, and one of the leading left-handed batsmen of the 1830s and 1840s. He played under the name 'Felix' to disguise his cricket activities from the parents of his pupils. Felix on the Bat, first published by Baily Brothers of London in 1845 and reissued in expanded editions in 1850 and 1855, was a 96-page coaching manual on the art of batting. It included Felix's own lithographed illustrations of stance, forward play, the cut and the leg-glance — the first systematic visual treatment of cricket technique in print. Felix had also invented a 'catapulta', a mechanical bowling device of Indian rubber that would propel a ball at a batsman, and the book gave the first published description of using a bowling machine for net practice. Felix's terminology — forward, back, the cut, the draw, the leg-glance — was adopted by every coaching writer who followed, from John Nyren onward. The book, with its plates of Alfred Mynn, Pilch and Lillywhite in their playing styles, is now one of the most valuable cricket books of the nineteenth century.

“The forward play is the foundation of all good batting; without it no man can hope to excel.”

Felix continued to play for Kent and the Gentlemen until 1852, when failing eyesight forced him out. He spent the rest of his life painting and writing. His book remained the standard batting manual until W.G. Grace's Cricket appeared in 1891.