A History of Cricket at King Edward's School, BIrmingham

5 College in 1871 – Queen’s College were all out for 20 and KES won the match on first innings. Templeton and Allcock were probably the two leading players of the period. Templeton appears only to have played for two seasons, 1864 to 1865, but in a period of low scores he played several major innings – 44 against Bromsgrove in 1864, 35 against the same opponents a year later, and 36 against the Warwickshire Knickerbockers, also in 1865. In a second match against the Warwickshire Knickerbockers in the same year, he took four wickets in the first innings and another seven in the second. Despite this, KES lost the match on first innings. In the year after he left, Templeton played for the Old Edwardians against the School and made 97. CH Allcock made his debut in 1871 and probably played until 1874: he is listed on the captain’s board as captain for 1874, but we have no details of matches played in that year or in 1873. He took five or more wickets in an innings on three occasions, including 6-25 against Belgrave in 1872. Tom Collins, Cambridge cricket Blue in 1863, was appointed to the staff of KES later that year. In his autobiography, School and Sport , he wrote: ‘Athletics at the school were then at their nadir, and I have always put down my election to the fact that the authorities desired the promotion of athletics.’ Hutton says: ‘Collins was ten years at the School, but unhappily this is his only reference to cricket or any other game. As Games Master he does not seem to have been a great success.’ This perhaps does him less than justice. Collins played for the School eleven on a number of occasions between 1864 and 1870 (just as Joseph Manton and AE Measures did forty years later). He made three fifties in 1864, 63 against the Warwickshire Knickerbockers in 1865 and 63 against Moseley in 1866, plus taking either five or six wickets on five occasions, but only twice did his efforts bring about a victory for KES – in 1864, when his score of 51 in a KES total of 128 was chiefly responsible for a 24-run win against the Old Edwardians, and in 1868, when his five wickets helped to dismiss Birmingham Athletic for 66, enabling KES to win by an unknown number of wickets. Perhaps this emphasises the weakness of School cricket in the 1860s. Not only was the team weak enough to need a master to play for them; even when he turned out, they still generally lost. Collins has his niche in general cricket history. In the University Match of 1863, he was no-balled because of the height of his arm: in those days of round-arm bowling, the Laws of Cricket prevented a bowler from delivering the ball from above the height of his shoulder. It seems that after a period of laxity, instructions had just been issued directing umpires to attend to the height of the bowler’s hand. This had some influence on the eventual legalisation of overarm bowling in 1864. When Collins died in 1934, in his 94th year, he was the oldest living cricket Blue. So the 1860s were a period of gradual decline. Standards were in general low, compared with what was to come. It seems that round about 1872 the cricket club may even have been disbanded, and that throughout this period, and for some time afterwards, cricket was kept alive by a small minority. As Hutton says, in a day school the urge to play games has to be induced, and the School was not really successful in doing this until the end of the nineteenth century, when Block games and a House system were set up, and the School Club was inaugurated (in 1902). Compulsory games did not come until 1950. The