To begin at the beginning – that would be good, if only we could. Do we start with the shepherds playing an ancestor of cricket on the weald in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or do we start with the first county match, Kent v Surrey at Dartford in 1709, or perhaps the first ‘great’ match for which we have a scorecard, the match on 18 June 1744 between Kent and All England at the Royal Artillery Ground in London, immortalised by James Love in his Cricket: An Heroic Poem? Kent won that game by one wicket, showing the strength of cricket in the county almost 300 years ago. Remember, this was before a couple of decades before the Hambledon Club established its dominance in English cricket.
However, there is so little reliable evidence of regular cricket in those times, that perhaps it is better to begin with the arrival on the cricket field of the first of Kent’s great players and innovators, John Willes, in 1806. So I will.
From him, we will trace the history of Kent cricket through fourteen men, whose careers overlapped by at least one match in which they both played, giving an unbroken chain of Kentish team-mates over 219 years, from 1806 to 2025.
- John Willes
John Willes was born in Headcorn in 1778, into a prosperous landowning family. With little need to earn a living apart from collecting rents, he devoted much of his time to sport, notably hunting (he kept his own pack of hounds and was a renowned marksman) and cricket. He has been described as a typical Regency gentleman, ‘dare-devil, utterly fearless, generous with his money and betting heavily on the games he played’, as RL Arrowsmith wrote in his 1971 history of Kent cricket. We first come across him playing for a team described as ‘Kent’ in 1806, the year after Nelson’s victory and death at the Battle of Trafalgar, against England at Bowman’s Lodge, Dartford on August 5th and 6th. Kent won by 127 runs, although Willes’ contribution was just 7 and 2. He was famed mainly as a bowler, and it was his bowling which brought him fame, some infamy and cricketing immortality.
Cricket at this time was a very different game to what it became 60 years later, with a wicket that was smaller than it is today (24 inches high and 7 inches wide, as opposed to 28 inches high and 9 inches wide today) and a pitch that was very much less well prepared than today, indeed very often hardly prepared at all. That made batting often painful and sometimes downright dangerous, and bowling often a matter of luck. Willes knew that David Harris of Hambledon, perhaps the quickest and best bowler of the previous generation, managed to make the ball bounce more than his contemporaries, and Willes found a way to emulate him almost by mistake. His sister, Christiana, and her dress sense, plays an important part in the story, as John used to ask his sister to bowl at him when he wanted some batting practice. In the style of the time, Christiana wore skirt with full crinoline petticoats which ballooned out so far that she could not bowl underarm without her hand getting caught in her skirts. So she bowled while keeping her arm above the level of her skirts, i.e. round-arm. John found this style of bowling much harder to play than underarm, and tried it himself. Soon he was using this method in all his matches, and he usually got away with it, despite round-arm bowling being illegal. It was said at the time that Willes, his sister Christiana and his pet dog, which he had trained to fetch the ball, were a match for any cricket team in England.
His round-arm bowling created a schism in the cricket world, with players and administrators taking up strongly opposed views as to the legality of this new style. One of Willes’ most vocal supporters was George Knight of Godmersham, Jane Austen’s nephew and himself a fine cricketer. Opposed to him was William Ward, an influential voice within MCC, and Lord Frederick Beauclerk, a roguish aristocratic priest and inveterate gambler, who was also incidentally a very fine cricketer. In 1816 was introduced to attempt to ban round-arm bowling, but it was difficult to interpret and different umpires held different views. So Willes continued to bowl in his new style, largely unpenalized.
At this time, although top class cricket was bound by laws first drawn up over fifty years earlier, and the Marylebone Cricket Club had been formed in 1787, there was still no formal organisation of county clubs, so any team called ‘Kent’ was really just a collection of the best men in the county that the particular match sponsor could find. There were no professional cricketers as such, although there were men employed by rich cricket loving landowners as gardeners or groundsmen, who were really there just to win cricket matches for their employer. There were, however, already two cricket ball manufacturers in the county, Duke’s at Penshurst, established in the 1760s, and Reader’s at Teston, established in 1808, which shows that the spread of the game, at least in the south-eastern corner of England, was enough to encourage businesses to be built around it.
The round-arm argument was still raging when Willes captained Kent versus MCC at Lord’s of 15th July 1822. Lord Frederick Beauclerk was playing for MCC and was determined that the umpires should do their duty, especially as he knew that Willes, bowling in his round-arm style, was the most dangerous bowler that MCC would be facing in this game. MCC batted first, and after an uncontroversial first over, Willes opened the bowling from the other end. Almost immediately, he was no-balled, by the umpire who was either in the pay of, or else much intimidated by, Lord Frederick. As is recorded, Willes immediately left the field, jumped onto his horse and rode away from Lord’s “in high dudgeon”, and was never seen on a cricket field again. Kent were allowed a substitute for the remainder of the game, and despite the absence of their captain Willes and the machinations of Beauclerk, Kent won by 127 runs.
Thus ended the career of the first great innovator, and perhaps one of the great bowlers, in Kent’s cricket history.
How much of the story of his sister’s petticoats is true and how much has grown in myth over the centuries is for others to decide, but Willes was certainly the first man to bowl in great matches in a style that was not underarm, and he definitely did ride off from Lord’s “in high dudgeon”. He died in 1852, aged 75. His tombstone in Sutton Valence churchyard bore the inscription, “He was a patron of all manly sports and the first to introduce round arm bowling in cricket”.