Nicholas Felix — Schoolmaster, Artist and Batsman — Retires from First-Class Cricket, 1852

The convention of 'gentlemen' and 'players' meant that a man who earned his living by another profession could not appear openly as a professional cricketer without social risk. Felix's pseudonym was an elegant solution that fooled nobody but preserved appearances.

Nicholas Wanostrocht was born in London in October 1804, the son of a Belgian emigrant. As the proprietor and head of Alfred House Academy, a private school at Camberwell, he had a social reputation to protect; playing cricket professionally, or even publicly, might compromise his standing with parents. He therefore played throughout his first-class career under the alias 'N. Felix'. His left-handed batting — unusual in an era dominated by right-handers — was elegant and technically sound: he scored 4,702 runs at 17.16 across 187 first-class matches for Kent and various representative sides, with a highest score of 79. He was an accomplished watercolourist and his images of the cricket grounds and players of the 1830s and 1840s are the finest visual record of the game in that era. His book *Felix on the Bat* (1845), written as instruction for beginners, was the most thorough batting manual of its time. By 1852 his health was declining and the Kent side of the Mynn-Pilch era was breaking up; he retired quietly after that season and died at Meopham in Kent in September 1876.

“Felix — a cricketer, painter and author, at once the most versatile and the most gentlemanly figure of the great Kent eleven.”

Felix's retirement removed one of the last great figures of the pre-Grace batting era from the field. His watercolours, preserved in collections at Lord's and elsewhere, are the primary visual record of cricket in the 1830s and 1840s.