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

36 (910 runs). The loss of these players was probably the main reason why WK Wyatt’s team could only win three matches in 1930 while losing four. Wyatt held the side together with a personal contribution of 353 runs and 54 wickets. His batting perhaps suffered slightly because of the amount of bowling he was called upon to do. In the first match against Denstone he took 8 for 56 and then scored 52 not out, but KES could only draw, finishing 39 runs short of Denstone’s total with seven wickets down. Against Warwickshire Club and Ground he played a major part in winning the match with bowling figures of 7-23 and an innings of 50. In the return match against Denstone at Denstone, he made 91, another match- winning performance, only two fewer than the Denstone total, and he also took four wickets. However, he failed with the bat against Jesus College, Oxford: KES were all out for 85, and even Wyatt’s 6 for 14 could not prevent Jesus winning by two wickets. There was not much support from the other players, though C Rainbow made 250 runs (including 64 not against Wrekin in the only other victory of the season) and DC Hills took 29 wickets. The side as a whole generally did not make enough runs. However, there were a few occasions when the batting clicked, one against the Old Edwardians, when KES made 223 for seven declared (Wyatt 59, supported by forties from Lyttleton and Hills); the OEs narrowly escaped losing, finishing on 183 for nine. The other was against FN Bryan’s XI, when Wyatt was again the chief contributor with 69, but four other batsmen made scores of 20 or more in a total of 202. It was reported that the two hundred was also exceeded on a third occasion: this must have been in one of the two matches of which we have no details. Wyatt left School at the end of the season, after a long and honourable career – 1,583 runs, a record up to that point, one not exceeded until 1965, and 112 wickets, a total only exceeded by eight other bowlers prior to 1930, three of them in the nineteenth century in conditions much more favourable to bowlers. RA Lyttleton also left at the end of the year. He had played for three years, from 1928 to 1930. Although he was far from being Wyatt’s equal as a cricketer (he only scored 360 runs in his three years in the side), he remains a person of interest: he later became FRS and Professor of Theoretical Astronomy at Cambridge, and he was the author of an article on the science of swing bowling reproduced in The Art of Cricket by Sir Donald Bradman – one of the classic instructional works on cricket. Thus ended the third great era in the history of School cricket. Apart from a slight interruption in the middle of the decade, the twenties constituted a very long spell on the heights, during which nearly all the batting records were broken, and some very great players appeared.