Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard, the amateur fast bowler, big-game hunter and Country Life writer, spent the 1910s in a near-evangelical public campaign to revive English fast bowling — arguing that the game was being dominated by spin and slow bowlers and that England would lose Tests until it produced new pacemen.
Hesketh-Prichard had played for Hampshire from the 1900s and was a Country Life writer of substantial fame.
His 1910s articles increasingly focused on the lack of English fast bowlers. Foster's emergence in 1911-12 he greeted enthusiastically; his accident in 1915 he treated as a national tragedy.
Hesketh-Prichard was one of the most extraordinary characters of his cricketing generation: an amateur fast bowler good enough to play for Hampshire and the MCC, an explorer who had ranged the Patagonian and Newfoundland wildernesses, a published novelist and a Country Life columnist. Through the 1910s he campaigned in print and at MCC committee meetings for an English fast-bowling revival. His articles argued that pre-war English Test sides relied too heavily on slow and slow-medium bowlers — Rhodes, Blythe, Barnes — and would be vulnerable on hard wickets without a genuine quick. The argument had merit; Cotter and Macdonald (later) gave Australia an attacking edge English county sides could not match. During the war Hesketh-Prichard served as a sniping officer on the Western Front and pioneered the British Army's sniping training school — perhaps the most direct application of fast-bowling skills to military use of any cricketer. He died of an infection in 1922 at 45, the campaign for fast-bowling revival incomplete.
Pre-1910: Hampshire fast bowler and writer
1910s: Public campaign for English fast bowling revival
1914-18: Pioneers British Army sniping training
1922: Dies of an infection at 45
1900s
Hampshire fast bowler
1910s
Public campaign for fast-bowling revival
1914-18
Sniping training school in the army
“England will not win Test matches without fast bowlers.”
His campaign was vindicated in the inter-war years as English pace declined and Australia's Larwood-Voce era forced the issue. Bodyline (1932-33) is in some sense the late echo of Hesketh-Prichard's argument.
An amateur fast bowler whose 1910s public campaign for English pace bowling foreshadowed every English-cricket debate of the next century.
Hesketh-Prichard is one of the small group of English cricket writer-evangelists — alongside Cardus and Robertson-Glasgow — who shaped how the country thought about the game in the early 20th century.
England
1932-08-12
In August 1932 the MCC selectors confirmed Douglas Jardine as England's captain for the 1932-33 tour of Australia, a decision contested at the highest levels of English cricket and one that — combined with Plum Warner's appointment as tour manager — would set the conditions for the Bodyline series.
England
1934-03-21
On 21 March 1934 Douglas Jardine wrote to The Cricketer that he had 'neither the desire nor the intention' of playing in the upcoming home Ashes series. The announcement, taken as a quiet resignation, removed the architect of Bodyline from the field before Australia returned to England — a precondition Australia's Board had implicitly demanded.
England / Gloucestershire
1937-11-15
In November 1937 Wally Hammond — the leading professional batsman of his era — was accepted by MCC as an amateur, opening the door to the England captaincy he received six months later for the 1938 Ashes. The change crystallised inter-war debates about the amateur-professional divide and the unwritten rule that England's captain be amateur.