Aubrey Faulkner Opens Cricket School in London — 1924

Faulkner had been one of the four 'googly twins' of the South African 1907 tour of England — wrist-spinners who used Bosanquet's then-new googly delivery. His post-war coaching career began at Eastbourne College in 1920; the Walham Green school was the commercial extension of that coaching practice.

Aubrey Faulkner had been South Africa's leading all-rounder before the First World War — Test batting average 40.79, 82 Test wickets at 26.58 — and had served with the British Army on the Salisbury front, winning the Distinguished Service Order. After the war he settled in England and coached at Eastbourne College.

In April 1924 he opened a dedicated indoor coaching school in Walham Green (now Fulham), London. The 'Faulkner School of Cricket' was the first dedicated commercial coaching academy in cricket — a hall with bowling machines (then a novelty), nets, mirrors for batting analysis, and individual lessons booked by the hour. Faulkner's students included K.S. Duleepsinhji, Jack Crawford, the Nawab of Pataudi senior, and a teenage Bob Wyatt.

The school operated through the 1920s and 1930s. Faulkner's coaching philosophy — emphasis on the back-foot defensive position, the value of net practice across the winter, the importance of reading the bowler's grip — became the most influential English coaching doctrine of the inter-war period. Faulkner died by suicide in 1930 at the age of 48; the school closed in 1939.

“Cricket can be taught as a craft. The English have for too long believed it can only be inherited.”

Faulkner's coaching influence ran through three generations of English cricket. K.S. Duleepsinhji, the Nawab of Pataudi senior, and Bob Wyatt all became Test cricketers under his tutelage. The model of dedicated coaching schools — indoor practice, individualised attention, video / mirror analysis — became standard from the 1960s onward.