On this week in 1910, precisely 110 years ago, Ernest Killick, universally known as Tim, took seven wickets for 10 runs in 7.2 overs while playing for Sussex in a County Championship match against Essex. The circumstances were unusual, Essex going for fast runs in an unsuccessful effort to force victory, but the achievement wasn’t unique.
“These remarkable figures flattered his bowling, for the Essex men made no attempt to play a normal game, but hit practically at everything,” the Guardian reported. “Still Killick bowled well. Every season he accomplishes several of these performances with the ball.” The previous year he took seven for 39 against Derbyshire; in 1907 five wickets for two runs in 6.1 overs against Hampshire; in 1905 four for two against Nottinghamshire; in 1901 six for 17 against Somerset.
Yet Killick is remembered now for only one thing: conceding 34 runs in a single over, a world record that stood for 57 years until Gary Sobers met Malcolm Nash. It happened in May 1911, during an innings by Nottinghamshire’s Ted Alletson that the Guardian declared to be “never equalled so far as any records of the game can show”. The batsman came in with his side at 185 for seven in their second innings, and thus, such was Sussex’s success in their first knock, leading by just nine. In the 50 minutes before lunch he scored 47, and it was at the interval that he had a famous conversation with his captain, Arthur Jones.
“Mr Jones, does it matter what I do?” he asked.
“No Alletson, I don’t think it matters what you do.”
“Oh, then I’m not half going to give Tim Killick some stick.”
And this he proceeded to do. In the 40 minutes after lunch his side scored 152, of which Alletson was responsible for 142. At one point he scored 97 runs in five overs including the record-smashing 34, earned with three sixes and four fours (there were two no-balls). He was eventually out for 189, and when Alletson returned to his home in Whitwell, Derbyshire, two days later he was met off the train by 50 schoolboys and rode across town in a horse and carriage while “all along the route crowds assembled and heartily cheered the sun-burnt cricketer”.
Killick was not even predominately a bowler, and these vignettes suggest a player of wild unpredictability even though such a player would not, as Killick was, be relied upon by his county for 15 years in which he scored 18,768 runs and took 729 wickets.
The record for most consecutive first-class appearances for any team is held by Ken Suttle, who played 423 games in a row between 1954 and 1969. Suttle only just managed to beat the previous record-holder, the dogged opener Joe Vine, who played in 421 consecutive matches from 1900 to 1922. Vine in turn had taken the record off Killick, who played 390 successive games between July 1898 and June 1912. All three players represented Sussex, two of them at the same time.
Wild scoring records such as Alletson’s are rarely forgotten, but there are so many other reasons to remember Killick. He was a smart batsman – “When set he is a beautiful bat, cutting and off-driving being the chief features of his game,” wrote Sporting Life – who scored one double-century, during a second-wicket partnership of 349 with CB Fry. Ranjitsinhji, soon to the ruler of the Indian princely state of Nawanagar, was in the Sussex team when he made his debut century in 1896 and was so impressed he presented Killick with a gold watch. Athletic News reported that when he hit 106 against the Australians three years later spectators were “so pleased with the innings that he was then and there presented a subscription of £50”. He remained connected with Sussex after his retirement, becoming their official scorer in the 1930s and continuing in that role until his death in 1948.
But his was not a story of simple sporting achievement. His first mention in the press came in February 1883, when he was just eight years old, and he and two co-conspirators pleaded guilty to the crime of “playing pitch and toss at Crowborough”. It was, reports noted, his second offence. In 1892 the then 17-year-old was back in court, “summoned for assaulting Annie Farly, a domestic servant, at Horsham. According to the evidence of the complainant, the assault consisted of the defendant having kissed her.”
In 1894 he was at the Coopers’ Arms in Withyham when the landlord’s daughter, Bertha Wallis, told him to leave the pub “on account of his filthy language”. She said he refused to go, was “not drunk but very violent” and threw two glasses and a pint pot at her; he said he left as soon as he was asked and that Walllis hit him with a broom, but another court case followed. There were to be more issues with drunkenness, one while in charge of a gun, and another charge of refusing to leave the Coopers’ Arms. In 1902 he was accused of “wanton damage to shrubs” on a Sussex farm.
In 1914, the year after he finally faded out of the Sussex side, and for offences I have been unable to discover, he was an inmate in Grantham Workhouse. Killick was by then making a living as a painter and decorator, and when asked while incarcerated to paint the interior of the workhouse did such a good job that the governors not only decided to prematurely discharge him, but to pay him five shillings a week and rations to come back and finish the job. There are several reports of his fine musicianship, including a two-hour singsong after a fundraising dinner in 1935 in which, according to the West Sussex Gazette, he “showed the same confident touch on the piano as he used to exploit with his late cut”.
But during his playing career Tim Killick was renowned for one thing most of all. “In 1897 his cricket suffered so materially he concluded his eyes were weak,” Athletic News reported. “Many a faint-heart would have abandoned the game at once, but Killick is the very personification of quiet determination and he boldly took to wearing spectacles. With their aid he placed himself in the forefront among English professionals of all-round abilities.”
In 1928 Neville Cardus wrote about him in the Guardian. “Killick was probably the first professional cricketer ever to play continuously in glasses,” he wrote. “He had the courage to do so at a time when Victorian England regarded spectacles as a sure sign of the weakling and the mollycoddle. Killick’s cricket advanced out of all recognition from the day he was able to get a clear sight of a ball.”
And perhaps he would have been better remembered for it had Alletson not been quite so clearsighted himself that May afternoon in 1911.
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