At the Ageas Bowl on the second day of the Third Test against Pakistan, Zak Crawley completed his innings of 267, to beat the Highest Score By A Kent Player In Tests For England (HSBAKPITFE). It was a magnificent achievement, the first of many we hope, and I think we all know by now that it was Rob Key’s record that he beat. Certainly, Rob’s fellow commentators on Sky did not let him or us forget it. But who were the previous holders of this acronymically challenging title?
Charles Absolom – the first 50 by a Kent man in Tests
The England selectors did not see fit to include any Kent players in the first Test match of all, and it was not until the only Test of Lord Harris’s tour to Australia in 1878/79 that Kent were represented in the national side. In that game, at Melbourne beginning on 2 January 1879, Lord Harris became the first Kent man both to captain and to bat for England. He won the toss and chose to bat, but the score was 10 for 3 when he came to the crease. It was 26 for 6, of which Harris had made 10 or so (checking the records is not easy) when he was joined at the crease by Francis Mackinnon, the Mackinnon of Mackinnon, another Kent man who had the task of preventing the Australian “Demon” Fred Spofforth from completing his hat-trick. He failed, thus being the first man to share the honour of the lowest score by a Kent player in Tests, a first ball duck. Zak Crawley, playing at Old Trafford against West Indies this summer, is the latest member of that ignominious group.
Spofforth’s bowling of a scion of Kentish and Scottish aristocracy only brought Charles Absolom to the wicket, a Kent man playing in his only Test. Absolom not only stopped Spofforth from taking four in four, he also put on 63 with Lord Harris for the eighth wicket. When Harris was out for 33, he took the title of highest scoring Kent player dismissed in a Test, but by then Absolom had already overtaken his score, and when he was out a little later on, he took the title of HSBAKPITFE with his score of 52. This record only lasted twenty months before it was matched, but not beaten, by Lord Harris again, who scored 52 against Australia at the Oval in September 1880. His score of 52 was exactly 100 less than W G Grace’s score in the same innings, but Lord Harris, as captain, led England to a five wicket victory in that game, the first ever Test match played in England.
The record shared by Harris and Absolom (who incidentally died aged 43, crushed by a load of sugar cane being loaded onto a ship Port Of Spain, Trinidad) lasted only until January 1883, when the Kent and England wicket-keeper Edward Ferdinando Sutton Tylecote scored 66 against Australia at Sydney. This was Ivo Bligh’s tour (another Kent man, of course) and after England won this match by 69 runs, some ladies burned a bail – so they say – and put the ashes in a little urn which they gave to Bligh, and the Ashes legend was born. Bligh’s top score in Tests was, incidentally, a mere 19. So with his score of 66, Tylecote took on the title of HSBAKPITFE.
Edward Tylecote, the first Kent and England wicket-keeper
His record lasted 25 years, less about three weeks, until the New Year’s Test at Melbourne in 1908, when Kenneth Hutchings made his only Test hundred, 126. This match was the second Test of the series, the only Test of the five that England won. The margin was just one wicket, thanks to an unbroken last wicket stand of 39 between the great Sydney Barnes and Kent’s own Arthur Fielder. Hutchings’ century was the first by a Kent player in Tests, but he only held the HSBAKPITFE title for four years before it was taken from him by possibly the greatest cricketer ever to represent Kent and England.
Frank Woolley scored 133 not out at the Sydney Cricket Ground at the end of February 1912, in the Fifth Test of that winter’s series. It was his first of five Test hundreds and it was enough to take over the HSBAKPITFE title. England had already won three of the four preceding Tests, under the leadership of Essex man “Johnny Won’t Hit Today” Douglas, so there was nothing riding on the result. England won anyway, by 70 runs. Woolley’s record lasted until after the First World War, when it was beaten at Lord’s in June 1924, in the Test against the visiting South Africans. The new record score was 134 not out, just one more than the previous record, but as the scorer of this century was none other than Frank Woolley again, we can be pretty certain nobody bothered about this particular milestone. His hundred was part of an England score of 531 for 2 declared (Jack Hobbs 211, Herbert Sutcliffe 122, Patsy Hendren 50 not out – quite a top four) as England won by an innings. Five years later, also against South Africa but this time at Old Trafford, Woolley did it again, scoring 154 in the 4th Test of that summer’s series. He shared in a partnership of 245 with Bob Wyatt, and again England won by an innings. This was the first innings of 150+ by a Kent batsman in Tests, but within seven months, it was totally eclipsed.
The man who beat Woolley’s eighteen-year dominance of the HSBAKPITFE was Geoffrey Legge, who only played five Tests for England, all overseas, but in one of those five, against New Zealand at Auckland in February 1930 he scored 196, thus helping England to reach a first innings total of 540. Frank Woolley was playing in that match, and thus would have seen his record disappear, but he does not seem to have borne much of a grudge against Legge thereafter.
Legge, who like a previous HSBAKPITFE, Kenneth Hutchings, was a casualty of war, kept the record for the longest time of all the record holders. It was not until 74 years and five months later that Rob Key made his 221, against West Indies in the First Test of the 2004 series. Key shared in a stand of 291 with Andrew Strauss on the way to his double century, a stand which was less than the Crawley/Buttler stand that changed the game against Pakistan, but even that is not the biggest partnership in Test cricket featuring a Kent player. That title goes to Colin Cowdrey (you were probably wondering when we were going to get round to him) who made 154 when he put on 411 with Peter May (285*) against West Indies at Edgbaston in 1957. Sadly Keysey’s double hundred was to prove his only three figure innings in England colours, but still he probably expected to keep his title of HSBAKPITFE longer than he did. He should not have mentored Zak so well.
Just to complete things, these are the only 150+ scores made by Kent players for England:
267 Zak Crawley 2020
221 Rob Key 2004
196 Geoffrey Legge 1930
188 Mike Denness 1975
182 Colin Cowdrey 1962
181 Mike Denness 1975
160 Colin Cowdrey 1959
159 Colin Cowdrey 1962
155 Colin Cowdrey 1960
154 Colin Cowdrey 1957
154 Frank Woolley 1929
152 Colin Cowdrey 1957
151 Colin Cowdrey 1963
If your name ends in -ey, you have a great chance of being on that list.
For the record, we have only been able to find four instances of Kent overseas players scoring 150+ for their countries while on Kent’s books: three by Asif Iqbal (175 for Pakistan v New Zealand in 1973, 166 v New Zealand in 1976 and 152* v Australia in the Christmas Test of 1976), and Carl Hooper (178* for West indies v Pakistan in 1993). So Asif is HSBAKPITFP, and Hooper is HSBAKPITFWI. Titles I know they will cherish.
A really interesting, enjoyable and light-hearted post.
David \Robertson