#middlesex

15 incidents tagged

Compton the Brylcreem Boy — Cricket's First Modern Sports Brand

England (cultural)

1950-04-22

Denis Compton's face on a poster, hair slick with Brylcreem, became the most recognisable image of British sport in the early 1950s. From 1949 he was paid by the County Chemical Company for the right to use his image, making him the first British cricketer to monetise his sporting reputation through commercial endorsement and the prototype for every subsequent sports brand deal.

#england#denis-compton#brylcreem

⭐Mild

Compton's Other Final — Arsenal's FA Cup, April 1950

Arsenal vs Liverpool

1950-04-29

On 29 April 1950 at Wembley, Denis Compton — already England's leading cricketer — won the FA Cup with Arsenal. He played the entire match on the left wing as Arsenal beat Liverpool 2-0, both goals scored by Reg Lewis. His brother Leslie played centre-half. Six weeks later Denis was again at Lord's. He remains one of the few sportsmen to have played a senior football final and a Test match in the same calendar year.

#denis-compton#arsenal#liverpool

⭐Serious

Compton's 3,816 Runs and 18 Hundreds — The 1947 Record Summer

Middlesex / England — Denis Compton

1947-09-13

In the dry, sunny English summer of 1947, Denis Compton scored 3,816 first-class runs at 90.85 with 18 centuries — both records that have stood for nearly 80 years and, with the modern fixture list, are widely considered unbreakable. His Middlesex partner Bill Edrich made 3,539 runs with 12 hundreds in the same summer, the second-highest of all time. Their batting carried Middlesex to the County Championship and lifted England to a 3-0 Test series win over South Africa. Compton was the Brylcreem Boy who turned austerity Britain back towards joy.

#denis-compton#1947#middlesex

⭐Mild

Patsy Hendren's 277 — Middlesex v Worcestershire, 1925

Middlesex v Worcestershire

1925-07-21

On 21 July 1925 the 36-year-old Patsy Hendren made 277 for Middlesex against Worcestershire at New Road — at the time his career-best, in a 1925 season in which he scored 3,311 runs at 70.44 and was second in the English averages only to Jack Hobbs.

#patsy-hendren#middlesex#worcestershire

🔥Explosive

A.E. Stoddart's Suicide — Former England Captain Found Dead, April 1915

England

1915-04-04

Andrew Ernest Stoddart, the only man to captain England at both cricket and rugby union and twice an Ashes-winning skipper in the 1890s, shot himself at his St John's Wood home on 4 April 1915. He was 52. His suicide was reported sympathetically in the press and quietly recorded by the inquest as the act of a man in poor health and worse spirits.

#andrew-stoddart#suicide#england

⭐Mild

Patsy Hendren Becomes Middlesex's Star — Pre-War Emergence

Middlesex

1914-08-01

Patsy Hendren made his Middlesex debut in 1907 and through the 1910s grew into one of the most popular cricketers ever to play at Lord's — short, jovial, brilliantly quick in the deep, and a batsman who would eventually score 170 first-class centuries.

#patsy-hendren#middlesex#england

🔥Explosive

Albert Trott's Suicide — Former Test Cricketer Found Dead, July 1914

Australia and England

1914-07-30

Albert Trott, the only batsman ever to hit a ball over the Lord's pavilion and a Test cricketer for both Australia and England, shot himself at his Willesden Green lodgings on 30 July 1914 — five days before Britain entered the war. He was 41, ill, in debt, and had left a hand-written will on the back of a laundry bill bequeathing his wardrobe to his landlady.

#albert-trott#suicide#australia

⭐Serious

Albert Trott — Pavilion Six, Two Hat-tricks in an Innings, and a Sad End

Middlesex, Somerset

1907-05-22

Albert Trott is the only batsman to clear the Lord's pavilion (off Monty Noble, 31 July 1899) and one of only two men to take two hat-tricks in a single first-class innings — both in his benefit match v Somerset at Lord's on 22 May 1907. Penniless and ill, he killed himself on 30 July 1914, the day before the 15th anniversary of his Lord's six.

#albert-trott#lords#middlesex

⭐Mild

Pelham 'Plum' Warner — Founder of the MCC Tour Tradition, 1900s

MCC, Middlesex, England

1903-12-11

Pelham 'Plum' Warner, the Trinidad-born Oxford-educated Middlesex amateur, captained the first MCC team to tour Australia under the club's name in 1903-04 and won that series 3-2. The tour established the convention that English overseas tours were thereafter MCC enterprises rather than private commercial ventures, an institutional change in international cricket whose effects lasted until 1977.

#plum-warner#mcc#middlesex

⭐Mild

How Bosanquet Invented the Googly — Twisti-Twosti and the Spinning Club

Middlesex, Leicestershire

1900-07-20

Bernard Bosanquet developed the googly — a leg-spinner's wrong'un that spins from off to leg — from a parlour game called 'Twisti-Twosti' played around 1897 with a tennis ball on a billiard table. He bowled the delivery in first-class cricket for Middlesex v Leicestershire at Lord's in July 1900, dismissing one batsman 'after four bounces'. Within five years it had revolutionised spin bowling.

#bernard-bosanquet#googly#twisti-twosti

⭐Moderate

Albert Trott's 1,000 Runs and 200 Wickets — The Only Such Double, 1899

Middlesex CCC

1899-09-15

In the 1899 first-class season Albert Trott scored 1,175 runs and took 239 wickets for Middlesex and the various invitational sides he played for. He became, and remains, the only cricketer to do a 1,000-run / 200-wicket double in a single first-class season — a feat he would repeat in 1900. The same summer he hit the only six ever to clear the Lord's pavilion. Wisden made him a Cricketer of the Year in 1899.

#albert-trott#1899#middlesex

⭐Serious

Jack Hearne's Headingley Hat-Trick — England's First v Australia, 1899

England v Australia

1899-06-29

On 29 June 1899, in the first Test ever played at Headingley, Middlesex's medium-pacer Jack Hearne took the wickets of Clem Hill, Syd Gregory and Monty Noble in three consecutive balls — England's first hat-trick against Australia in Test cricket. Australia were dismissed for 172. The match was drawn after Johnny Briggs collapsed in an epileptic fit overnight (see entry); the hat-trick lit one of the bleakest days in English cricket.

#jack-hearne#1899#headingley

⭐Mild

Old Trafford Becomes Lancashire's Home — First-Class Debut, 1865

Lancashire vs Middlesex

1865-07-20

Old Trafford had been laid out in 1857 as the home of Manchester Cricket Club. Lancashire CCC, formed in 1864, played its first first-class match at the ground in July 1865 against Middlesex and won by 62 runs. Old Trafford has been the home of Lancashire ever since — the second-oldest continuously used first-class venue after Lord's, host of more than 100 Test matches, and the indispensable counterweight to the southern grounds in English cricket geography.

#old-trafford#lancashire#1865

⭐Mild

First Centuries at the New Lord's — Ladbroke 116 and Woodbridge 107, 24-25 August 1815

Middlesex vs Epsom

1815-08-25

On 24-25 August 1815, in a Middlesex v Epsom match at the new Lord's, the Surrey amateurs Felix Ladbroke and Frederick Woodbridge scored 116 and 107 respectively — the first centuries made on the third Lord's ground at St John's Wood. The match was an unremarkable end-of-season fixture, but the dual hundreds, on a pitch barely sixteen months old, showed that the new ground could yield big scores in a way that the old grounds had never reliably done.

#lord-s#felix-ladbroke#frederick-woodbridge

⭐Mild

E.H. Budd's First Match at Lord's — Twenty-Two of Middlesex v Twenty-Two of Surrey, September 1802

Twenty-Two of Middlesex vs Twenty-Two of Surrey

1802-09-13

On 13-16 September 1802 a 16-year-old War Office clerk named Edward Hayward Budd appeared in his first match at Lord's, playing for a Twenty-Two of Middlesex against a Twenty-Two of Surrey. He scored 9 and 5 in an odds match that Arthur Haygarth's Scores and Biographies records as his earliest senior fixture. Budd would become, alongside Beauclerk, the dominant gentleman batter of the next twenty years.

#eh-budd#1802#lord-s-old-ground