We have been wondering recently who was Kent’s first overseas player. These days, every county has a whole raft of overseas players (not that they arrived in Britain on a raft, necessarily), and in Kent we have two born in South Africa – Dickson and Kuhn, three from Australia – Claydon, Stoinis and Stewart, not to mention Adam Rouse, born in Zimbabwe, our two New Zealanders, Matt Henry and Adam Milne, and the big West Indian Carlos Brathwaite. And of course there’s the man from north of Watford, Darren Stevens, born in Leicester.
Since the 1950s, when South Africans Stuart Leary and Sid O’Linn played for Kent, into the sixties and seventies when we were blessed with great overseas players like Asif Iqbal, John Shepherd, Eldine Baptiste and Bernard Julien, and then on into the present day, Kent have always welcomed players from around the world into the eleven. And so have all the other counties, even Yorkshire once they admitted that Lord Hawke was born in Lincolnshire and therefore not really a Tyke.
But who was the first? We have found four candidates, who could possibly win the title. They are, in alphabetical order, Bransby Beauchamp Cooper, Frank Hearne, Kanwar Shumshere Singh and Thomas Spencer Wentworth Wills. We will rule out Lord Harris, although he was born in the West Indies, on the basis that no more thoroughly Kent man ever lived.
Frank Hearne
The case for Frank Hearne as Kent’s first overseas cricketer is a very flimsy one. He played for Kent from 1879 until 1889, when he emigrated to South Africa for health reasons. He had already played Test cricket for England, but now played for South Africa against England, and even toured England with the South Africans in 1894. However, as all of his cricket under a foreign flag took place after he had left Kent, he hardly qualifies as an overseas player, let alone our first.
Bransby Beauchamp Cooper is another interesting case. He was born in Dacca (now Dhaka) in what was then India but is now Bangladesh, in 1844. He came to England as a boy and was educated at Rugby school. Despite being a fine sportsman with the right background, he did not go on to Oxford or Cambridge, but instead played cricket as an amateur for Middlesex from 1864 to 1867, and then turned out in a handful of games for Kent in 1868 and 1869, the year before the formation of the present county club. He then left the country, travelling first to the United States, and then a little later he moved to Australia, where he spent the rest of his life. He played once for Australia, in 1877 in the first Test match of all, and thus became an overseas cricketer who had played for Kent. But like Frank Hearne, his qualification rests on cricket played after he left Kent, so although he played a full decade before Frank Hearne, he is not Kent’s first overseas player.
Bransby Cooper
Who, I hear you cry, is Kanwar Shumshere Singh? Kanwar Singh was the grandson of the Maharajah of Kapurthala, then a small state in the Punjab, not far from Amritsar, the Sikh holy city. He was born in 1879 and sent to England as a boy where he studied at Rugby school (as did Bransby Cooper and, as we will see, Tom Wills) before going on to Pembroke College Cambridge, where he played just once for the university, against Surrey, in 1901. After graduating, he studied medicine at Bart’s Hospital in London, and played four matches for Kent in 1901 and 1902. It is not quite known how he qualified for Kent, but he had a brother living in the county, with whom he might have stayed while studying to become a doctor, and he was a Cambridge contemporary of both Dick Blaker and Sammy Day, who became Kent stalwarts. Singh’s career with Kent was not particularly brilliant, although he played more Championship games for the county than Daryll Cullinan. He scored 140 runs for the county, at an average of 20, with a highest score of 45, against Worcestershire at Maidstone. He was described as “a batsman with a strong defence” – clearly more Gavaskar than Kohli.
He subsequently joined the Indian Army and reached the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Medical Service. When he died (or to be more precise, the split second before he died) in India in 1975, just short of his 96thbirthday, he was Kent’s oldest living cricketer. Although he never played first-class cricket in his home country, his claim to be Kent’s first overseas cricketer is very strong, if we are only counting official County Championship matches, which of course began in 1890.
The other claimant to the title of Kent’s first overseas cricketer is the splendidly named Thomas Wentworth Spencer Wills. Tom Wills was born in Molonglo, now a suburb of Canberra, Australia in 1835. He was clearly from the outset a very talented sportsman, and his near contemporary Tom Horan, who played Test cricket for Australia in the 1870s and 1880s, described him as the W.G. Grace of Australia. This was probably laying it on a bit thick, but Wills was a remarkable player. His family background was archetypically Aussie – his grandfather had been deported from Britain in 1798 for armed robbery – but within fifty years the family fortunes had turned round to such an extent that young Tom was able to be sent to England to complete his education at Rugby school. This was the era of Dr. Arnold and “Tom Brown’s Schooldays”, so we have a good idea of what life at the school was like, and it does not sound, to modern ears, like fun.
Tom Wills
But Tom Wills enjoyed himself. He first played for Rugby in 1852, and took ten wickets with his fast round arm bowling against Westminster School in the first ever game between the two schools. In 1855, aged almost 20 but still at Rugby, he took eleven wickets for the school in their first ever match against Marlborough, at Lord’s. He left school that summer, and played for Kent for the first time. There seems to be no reason why he qualified for Kent, but this was before the county championship began, and before many county clubs were properly constituted, so we have to presume that he had friends who persuaded him to come to Kent for a few games. He played for Kent, for Gentlemen of Kent and for M.C.C. (of which he was almost certainly not a member) without achieving anything exceptional.
The next year, 1856, proved to be his last in England, but probably his most successful, if only for his achievement in gaining a Blue at Cambridge without actually being a student there. He seems to have specialized in playing for clubs for which he was not qualified. In “Oxford v Cambridge At The Wicket”, Pelham Warner explains that “as Cambridge were a man short, they took in T.W. Wills, who, although his name was on the College books, was never actually in residence”. He batted at number 9 and was, somewhat ironically, bowled by Cloudesley Marsham of Oxford and Kent, for 3. As Cambridge won by three wickets, he did not bat a second time. He did however, bowl in Oxford’s second innings, and took one wicket for 14 runs. After that he played once more for the Kent county side, and also several times for other teams. He played in Canterbury Week that year for the Gentlemen of Kent and Sussex, against M.C.C.
On his return to Australia, he lived near Geelong in Victoria, and spent most of his time playing cricket rather than studying law, as he was supposed to. He captained Victoria against George Parr’s touring team in 1864, played against W.G. Grace’s touring party in 1874 and also found time during the winter months to help develop Australian Rules football, of which he is now considered a founding father.
He survived a massacre in October 1861, when aboriginals attacked a settlement at Cullin-la-Ringo, and his father and eighteen others were massacred. The Wills Tragedy, as it is often called, affected him greatly. He got married in 1864 (to a lady who was actually already married to someone else), but later descended into alcoholism and general mental disintegration, and stabbed himself to death with a pair of scissors in 1880.
So there you have it. The first player from overseas to play for the full county side was probably Tom Wills, but the first overseas player to play championship cricket for Kent after 1890 was Kanwar Shumshere Singh. They both add significantly to the history of Kent cricket.
With grateful thanks to Derek Carlaw for much of the information about Tom Wills and Kanwar Singh