Nicholas Wanostrocht 'Felix' — Schoolmaster, Batsman and Author

Amateur cricket of the 1830s was dominated by a small number of leading players who held social standing alongside their sporting fame: Lord Frederick Beauclerk earlier, William Ward at Lord's, and now Felix among the schoolmaster-amateurs. Felix's combination of cultural and cricketing accomplishment was without parallel.

Wanostrocht was born in 1804 in Camberwell, the son of a Belgian-born schoolmaster who had set up Alfred House Academy in south London. The young Nicholas inherited the school in the 1820s and ran it for the rest of his career; it was as a schoolmaster that he adopted the pen-name 'Felix' (Latin for 'happy') to keep his cricket separate from his teaching. Felix became one of the leading amateur batsmen of the 1830s, particularly strong on the leg side and an expert cutter — his stroke-play was considered the most stylish of the age. He played regularly for Kent (as an amateur) alongside Pilch, Mynn and Wenman, and for the Gentlemen against the Players. His Kent connection was natural: his father's school and his own cultural roots were in the Kentish gentry world that produced Mynn. Beyond cricket Felix was a polymath: he painted (his portraits of Mynn, Pilch and other contemporaries are now in the MCC collection), composed music, spoke several languages, and was an inveterate inventor. In 1837 he patented the 'catapulta' — a spring-loaded bowling machine, the first in cricket history — which Kent used in practice. His instructional book *Felix on the Bat*, published 1845 with his own illustrations and a long appendix on the catapulta, is one of the great Victorian cricket texts.

“Mr Felix is a left-handed batsman of the highest order, and his cuts to the off and his hits to the on are equally to be admired.”

Felix continued playing into the 1840s. He sold the school in 1847, moved to Brighton, and later to the south coast, where he lived as a gentleman cricketer-painter on his savings and book royalties. He died in 1876.