Nicholas Felix — Artist, Author and Batsman: His Playing Peak in the 1840s

The combination of amateur cricketer, schoolmaster, artist and author was not unique to Felix — many Victorian gentlemen pursued multiple vocations — but the quality he achieved in all four was exceptional.

Wanostrocht, born in 1804, played under the pseudonym 'Felix' to protect his position as proprietor of a school in Blackheath from the social stigma attached to professional sport — though he was in fact an amateur, playing for nothing. His batting was in the Kent tradition of forward play, cultured and technically sound, and he appeared regularly for the county and for Gentlemen's sides through the 1830s and 1840s. His first-class record — 2,521 runs at 16.77 — underestimates his quality; many of his best performances were in matches that did not attain first-class status. In the 1840s he was simultaneously producing the watercolours of Alfred Mynn, Fuller Pilch, William Clarke and other contemporaries that would become the definitive visual record of the roundarm era. Felix on the Bat, published in 1845, set out the principles of correct batting technique with an elegance of expression that no other cricket writer of the period approached. He retired from first-class cricket in 1852.

“No man has written about cricket with more grace than Felix, who played it with equal grace.”