England v Australia
1934-08-25
Recalled at the age of 47 for England's final Ashes Test in 1934 after a six-year Test absence, Frank Woolley made 4 and 0 and was bypassed for the squads that followed. The Oval Test marked the end of one of cricket's most graceful and prolific careers — 64 Tests, 58,969 first-class runs, all of them lit by what John Arlott later called 'a cool, almost insolent grace'.
Kent and England
1925-08-31
In 1925 the 38-year-old Frank Woolley scored 3,069 first-class runs and took 110 wickets — one of the great all-round seasons in English county cricket and the formal peak of a career that would finish with 58,969 runs and 2,068 wickets, both still among the top five in cricket history.
England
1917-11-08
Colin Blythe, the slow left-arm spinner who had taken 100 Test wickets for England and been the heart of Kent's championship sides, was killed by a German shell while laying railway track behind the lines near Ypres on 8 November 1917. He was 38.
England
1916-09-03
Kenneth Hutchings, the dashing Kent batsman who had toured Australia with England in 1907-08 and scored 126 at Melbourne, was killed by a shell at Ginchy on the Somme on 3 September 1916. He was 33.
England
1914-07-01
Frank Woolley emerged in the years 1910-1914 as the most beautiful left-handed batsman in cricket — Kent's all-round star, England's middle-order hope and, after the war, one of only nine men to score over 50,000 first-class runs.
Kent
1913-09-01
Kent won the County Championship in 1909, 1910 and 1913 — three titles in five seasons, built on the bowling of Colin Blythe and Arthur Fielder, the batting of Frank Woolley and Ken Hutchings, and the wicket-keeping of Fred Huish. The pre-war Kent side is widely regarded as the strongest in the county's history.
England, South Africa
1907-07-30
On a rain-affected pitch at Headingley, the Kent left-arm spinner Colin Blythe took 8 for 59 and 7 for 40 — match figures of 15 for 99 — to bowl England to a 53-run win over South Africa in the second Test of 1907. It was Blythe's only Test five-wicket haul in a Test won by England, and the high point of his Test career.
England in Australia
1878-12-01
Lord Harris's 1878-79 tour of Australia was the first England touring side led by an amateur captain to play what would later be recognised as a Test match. The trip produced the third Test in history — the Spofforth hat-trick match at Melbourne — and the Sydney Riot at the Association Ground in February 1879.
Kent vs other counties
1865-09-01
Kent, the most successful county of the 1830s and 1840s under Fuller Pilch's batting, fell into financial and competitive decline through the 1860s. With Pilch retired, Kent was sometimes forced to field elevens of up to sixteen by combining with local club cricketers from Whitstable, Faversham and Ashford. The 1862 Willsher walk-off was Kent's most consequential moment of the decade — but its leading bowler's career and the club's increasing reliance on him underline how thin the county's resources had become.
England XI vs Surrey
1862-08-26
Bowling for an England XI against Surrey at the Oval on 26 August 1862, the Kent left-armer Edgar Willsher was no-balled six times in a row by umpire John Lillywhite for raising his hand above the shoulder. Willsher and the eight other professionals in the team marched off the field in protest, leaving the two amateurs stranded. Lillywhite quietly stood down the next day, and within two years the MCC had legalised overarm bowling.
MCC vs Kent
1862-08-15
Three years before his younger brother W.G. made his first-class debut, E.M. Grace produced one of the most extraordinary all-round performances in cricket history. Playing for the MCC at Canterbury Week against Kent on 14-15 August 1862, the 20-year-old from Downend carried his bat for 192 not out of an MCC total of 344, then took all ten Kent wickets in the first innings for 69 runs. The match, played 12-a-side, would not enter the official records — but the news of it travelled around the cricket world and made E.M. Grace a household name overnight.
Kent and various sides
1859-08-31
The 1859 season was the final first-class summer of Alfred Mynn, the Lion of Kent — a 22-stone right-arm fast-roundarm bowler and powerful hitter who had been a household name since the 1830s. Mynn played his last serious cricket at the age of 52, two years before his death; his career closed at the same moment that Parr's twelve sailed for North America and the post-Mynn generation took the game overseas.
Kent and various sides
1854-08-31
Fuller Pilch, the Norfolk-born professional batsman who had moved to Town Malling in Kent in 1835 and become the leading run-maker in England for nearly two decades, played his last serious cricket in 1854 at the age of 50. Pilch was widely regarded as the best batsman in the world before W.G. Grace; his patient forward play — the famous 'Pilch poke' — was the bridge between the rough-pitch hitters of the early nineteenth century and the technical batsmen of the Victorian era.
Kent / All-England Eleven
1846-08-15
Alfred Mynn's near-amputation at Leicester in 1836 — when, having batted on with a leg blackened by repeated fast roundarm blows, he was reportedly carried back to London on the roof of a stage coach — passed into cricket folklore through the 1840s. By 1846 the story was retold at every Mynn match, and the Leicester injury had become as much a part of his identity as his bowling and single-wicket dominance.
n/a
1845-05-01
Nicholas Wanostrocht, the schoolmaster who played first-class cricket for Kent under the pseudonym 'Felix', published Felix on the Bat in 1845 — the first systematic coaching manual on batting, illustrated with his own lithographed plates. It defined the technical vocabulary of forward and back play that English coaching would use for the next century.
Kent / All-England
1842-08-01
Alfred Mynn of Kent — six feet one and weighing more than twenty stone — was the dominant fast roundarm bowler of the early 1840s and the best all-round cricketer in England. His annual displays at Lord's, Town Malling and Canterbury, his peerless single-wicket record (he was champion of England 1838-46), and the carrying-off of his amputated leg in 1836 had made him the first popular cricket folk-hero of the Victorian age.
Kent
1842-04-01
Fuller Pilch's £100-a-year retainer with Kent, agreed with the proprietor Thomas Selby in the late 1830s, was the largest professional cricket contract of its day. By 1842 Pilch was the central figure in the Kent eleven; the move from Town Malling to Canterbury as the county's principal venue, completed by 1847, was built around his presence.
Kent vs England
1841-08-23
Fuller Pilch, by general agreement the leading batsman in England, scored 153 not out for Kent against an England eleven at Town Malling in August 1841. It was the highest individual score made in a major fixture for several years and confirmed Pilch as the dominant batsman of the pre-Grace generation.
Kent
1839-08-01
From 1836 to the late 1840s Kent was the strongest county in England. The combination of Alfred Mynn's fast roundarm bowling, Fuller Pilch's batting (after his 1836 transfer from Norfolk), Ned Wenman's wicketkeeping and Felix's amateur stroke-play made Kent the side every other county feared. The Canterbury Cricket Week, founded in 1842, would become the showpiece of this golden era.
Kent, Gentlemen of England
1838-06-01
Nicholas Wanostrocht — universally known by his pen-name 'Felix' — was the most cultured cricketer of the 1830s. The son of a Kent schoolmaster of Belgian descent, he ran a school in Camberwell, played for Kent as a left-handed amateur batsman of the first rank, painted, wrote, invented the catapulta bowling-machine, and would later produce the classic instructional text *Felix on the Bat* (1845).
Alfred Mynn (Kent) vs James Dearman (Yorkshire)
1837-08-21
In August 1837 the Sheffield batsman James Dearman, smarting from his innings-and-107 thrashing at Town Malling the previous September, demanded a return single-wicket match against Alfred Mynn. The rematch was played at Brighton on 21-22 August 1837 and went the same way as the first: Mynn won by an innings and 67 runs.
Kent, England
1837-07-01
Edward 'Ned' Wenman of Benenden in Kent was the wicketkeeper around whom the great Kent side of the late 1830s and 1840s was built. With Pilch and Mynn ahead of him in the order he was a useful lower-order batsman; behind the stumps he was reckoned the best wicketkeeper in England, taking Mynn's fast roundarm bowling without complaint and effecting more stumpings than any contemporary.
Alfred Mynn (Kent) vs James Dearman (Yorkshire)
1836-09-29
On 29 and 30 September 1836 the giant Kent fast bowler Alfred Mynn — already nicknamed 'the Lion of Kent' — met the Sheffield batsman James Dearman in a £100-a-side single-wicket challenge at Town Malling in Kent. Mynn, then 28 and weighing close to twenty stone, demolished Dearman: he scored 123 runs to Dearman's 0 and 16, and won by an innings and 107.
Norfolk to Kent
1836-04-01
Early in 1836 the Norfolk batsman Fuller Pilch — by then unanimously regarded as the leading batsman in England — was engaged as a paid professional by the Town Malling club in Kent at a salary of around £100 a year, plus the tenancy of a public house. The move marked the start of Kent's golden era under Alfred Mynn and was one of the earliest high-profile professional engagements in cricket.
Alfred Mynn vs the North
1836-08-29
In August 1836, between his two thrashings of Dearman, Alfred Mynn played a single-wicket match at Leicester in which his right leg was repeatedly hit by fast roundarm bowling at the unprotected shin. The injuries festered on the long coach journey home and Mynn nearly lost the leg to gangrene; he was strapped to the roof of the stagecoach because he could not bend his knee, and surgeons in London debated amputation before saving the limb.
Kent, Players of England
1834-08-01
Alfred Mynn of Goudhurst in Kent — six feet one inch tall, eighteen to twenty stone in his prime, and capable of bowling fast roundarm at speeds contemporaries described as terrifying — emerged through the 1830s as cricket's first true giant. Nicknamed 'the Lion of Kent', he was the central fast bowler of his era, the pre-eminent single-wicket cricketer, and the figure around whom the great Kent eleven of the late 1830s and 1840s was built.
Norfolk, Kent, England
1830-06-01
Through the 1830s the Norfolk-born professional Fuller Pilch was the most consistent batsman in England. Standing six feet tall and using a long forward stride that contemporaries called 'Pilch's poke' — the front foot pushed almost to the pitch of the ball before the bat came down — he reduced the new roundarm bowling to manageable terms when most batsmen were still being shelled out cheaply, and held the title of best bat in England for the better part of two decades.
Kent vs Sussex
1825-08-01
Edward 'Ned' Wenman, the carpenter and wheelwright from Benenden in Kent, made his important-match debut in a Kent v Sussex fixture in 1825 at the age of 22. He would go on to keep wicket — barehanded, without pads — to Alfred Mynn's express bowling for the great Kent eleven of the 1830s and 1840s, ending his career with 118 catches and 87 stumpings in 146 important matches.
MCC vs Kent
1822-07-15
Opening the bowling for Kent against MCC at Lord's on 15 July 1822, the Kent farmer John Willes — pioneer of the new roundarm action — was no-balled by the umpire for raising his hand above the prescribed level. Willes threw the ball down, walked off the ground, mounted his horse and rode out of cricket forever. He was the first man to be no-balled in a first-class match for an illegal bowling action and never played another important fixture.
Norfolk and various
1820-07-01
Fuller Pilch, born in Horningtoft, Norfolk in March 1804, made his first appearance at Lord's at the age of sixteen in 1820, playing for Norfolk against MCC. By the mid-1820s he was acclaimed as the best batsman in England, a status he held for nearly thirty years until W.G. Grace appeared in the 1860s. He pioneered forward play against the new roundarm bowling and gave his name to a famous attacking stroke called 'Pilch's Poke'.
Kent and various private XIs
1816-07-15
Through the 1810s the Kent gentleman cricketer John Willes of Tonford persisted with a delivery action that broke the laws of cricket: the arm raised level with the elbow, often higher, in defiance of the underarm law. According to Arthur Haygarth, Willes had picked up the action from his sister Christiana, who bowled to him in their garden when he was unwell. Through trial games for Kent and private elevens he forced the issue match by match, was no-balled repeatedly, and laid the foundation for the eventual legalisation of roundarm in 1828 and overarm in 1864.
n/a (private practice and family cricket)
1814-06-15
Christiana Willes (1786-1873) was the younger sister of John Willes of Tonford, the Kent gentleman who pushed roundarm bowling into senior cricket. According to a 1907 memoir by her son Edward Hodges and earlier testimony recorded by Arthur Haygarth, Christiana bowled to her brother in a barn at Tonford during the 1810s, and the higher arm action she used in those practice sessions was the prototype that John adopted in matches. The story has been embellished — particularly the popular claim that her wide skirts forced her to bowl roundarm — but the underlying record places Christiana at the technical origin of one of cricket's most consequential bowling reforms.
Kent XXIII vs All-England XIII
1807-07-29
In July 1807 the Kent farmer John Willes bowled what one newspaper called 'straight arm bowling' for a Kent XXIII against an All-England XIII at Penenden Heath, near Maidstone, in a match for £1,000 a side. It was the first attempt since Tom Walker's experiments in the 1780s to revive the higher-arm action that would become roundarm. The newspaper noted Willes's deliveries were 'an obstacle against getting runs'. The MCC would not formally legalise roundarm bowling for another 21 years.