Two different stories grabbed my attention this week, and then combined in the shape of one Kent cricketer. The first story began with Joe Denly being chosen for the T20 international against Sri Lanka, and opening the bowling – with great success it must be added. The question arose – when was the last time that a Kent player opened England’s bowling in any Test match or white ball international? Thoughts of Martin Saggers, Martin McCague, Dean Headley, Mark Ealham, Richard Ellison and even Alan Igglesden came into my head, and then I wondered if James Tredwell had ever opened the bowling in an ODI. And then another name cropped up, that of Amjad Khan, who played his only Test for England in the West Indies early in 2009. A quick check showed that he did not open the bowling in either innings for England – captain Strauss left that to Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad – and so the search went on. But I was then sidetracked into looking up Kent’s other one-Test wonders, a list which now contains fourteen names. There are only two one-ODI wonders from Kent, incidentally, one of whom, Mark Benson, is also a one-Test wonder. The other played one or two more Tests than Benny. His name was Colin Cowdrey. There are also two players on the one T20 international list – Rob Key and Amjad Khan again, but again Amjad did not open the bowling. I’m still not sure who the last England opening bowler from Kent before Joe Denly was. I’d be happy if somebody could put me out of my misery.

Amjad Khan

One of the fourteen Kent one-Test wonders also featured in our recent remembrance of the Armistice. Kent CCC held its annual Service of Remembrance at the Blythe Memorial on 8^thNovember, the anniversary of Blythe’s death, and this was as moving as ever. But it was watching the wonderful Peter Jackson film, They Shall Not Grow Old, on Remembrance Sunday evening that really hit home. One of the soldiers was quoted as saying that he did not fear death, because that would be quick and an end to it all. He feared injury, being broken and useless for the rest of his life, much more than death. It seems to me that though we quite rightly honour those who have made the ‘ultimate sacrifice’, we have not necessarily honoured those whose sacrifice may not have been so final but was at least as hard to bear, for both the soldiers and the families.

The one-Test wonder who went to war, but did not die, was Lt. Charles Stowell Marriott, known to his team mates and to a generation of Kent supporters as “Father”. His war story was told in Paul Lewis’ excellent book, For Kent and Country, and also in a recent Sunday Telegraph article, and it shows how the visible wounds are not always the deepest. Charles Marriott, a sickly boy who had been educated in Ireland in order to protect his health, was commissioned as a 2^ndLieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, his county of birth, in 1915 and was posted to France the following year, aged 20.

On 1 July 1916, Marriott took part in the attack on Thiepval, a strategically important Belgian village, but the attackers were quickly caught in German machine gun fire. The slaughter was immense. Marriott, not part of that suicidal first wave, was ordered to take his men to the front line trench, as replacements for those who had just been cut down. As he later wrote, “Our scrambles were speeded by the German machine-gunners above, who weren’t missing much that morning. After all these years I can still clearly see certain gruesome sights, burnt into the memory, as we struggled up to the front line.” He wrote of “hands, feet and shin bones protruding from the raw earth” and a soldier, “sitting in as shell hole, hands on knees, a sandbag over his shoulder. I lifted it to see if he were alive, and he had no head.”

Marriott’s platoon was saved that day by a last minute order not to go over the top. His troubles were by no means over, however, and on 22 July, he was caught in a mustard gas attack near Nieuport. He was the only officer, along with a dozen men, who was hospitalized by the attack, and sent back to England. By November that year, he was diagnosed as suffering from what we would now know as shell shock. His active war service was over, but the effects lasted all his life.

Charles “Father” Marriott

After the war, he went up to Cambridge, aged 25, and won his cricket blue as a leg-spinner in 1920 and 1921. Because he was several years older than his university team-mates, they christened him “Father”, a name which remained with him all his life. On graduation, he took up a teaching career at Dulwich College, and Lord Harris, who only a year or two earlier had prevented the Kent-born Wally Hammond from playing for Gloucestershire without the proper residential qualifications, was hoist with his own petard and had to wait before the Lancashire-born Marriott was allowed to play for Kent. Marriott went on to play 101 matches for Kent between 1924 and 1937, but his only appearance for England was against West Indies at the Oval in 1933. He took 5 for 37 and 6 for 59, but never played for England again. He was only picked for England as a replacement for the injured Hedley Verity (later to become a Second World War casualty), and his teaching career meant that he could never play a full season of cricket, and thus was unlikely to catch the selectors’ eye (or eyes). His career batting average of 4.41 and his fabled immobility in the field would not have helped, either. Marriott remains one of the select few regular first-class cricketers to have taken more wickets (711) than he scored runs (574). For Kent, he took 463 wickets and scored 356 runs.

When he died in 1966, aged 71, Wisden noted that during the Second World War “he served as an anti-aircraft gunner in the Home Guard”, but did not mention his service in the Great War.

Lest we forget.