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Widgets | Top Performer | Bright Moments | Photos | Airtel mChek |  |
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England players and officials - select an initial letter:
Ted Alletson England
Full name Edwin Boaler Alletson
Ted Alletson stands high in the minor mythology of cricket, with such as the boy Collins, Cyril Tyson, F. C. Cobden, R. St. L. Fowler, Paul Winslow and Harry Martyn. None of them had any consistent influence on the game, but all had hours of greatness that remain brief, but vivid, flashes in cricket history. Alletson's feat was probably the most remarkable of them - the greatest sustained hitting innings ever played; 189 scored in 90 minutes, the last 142 in 40 minutes. It was no easy innings: it robbed Sussex of an apparently certain win; it was made against four very capable county bowlers - one fast, one fast-medium (Albert Relf, who opened the bowling for England against Australia), one medium and a slow legspinner - and it contained only one chance, a difficult low catch to slip when he had made 42. Edwin Boaler Alletson was born on the Welbeck estate, where his father was a wheelwright, on March 6, 1884: he joined the Nottinghamshire ground staff in 1905 and remained a professional there until 1914. His first-class cricket record is unimpressive: 3,217 runs at an average of 18.59; 33 wickets at 19.02. Alletson probably could have been a better bowler than batsman. In his early days he bowled at lively fast-medium with good variations, and it was said that his captain, A. O. Jones, did not bowl him enough. Early in 1910, he took 6 for 74 against Northamptonshire and, in the next match opened the bowling against Sussex and took 3 good wickets for 40. But in the remaining twelve weeks of the season, he was given only another nineteen overs. There is no doubt that he found this bitterly frustrating, and all through several winters he practised in a net with his father to perfect a true, firger-spun leg-break, bowled at fast-medium pace. He first used it in a match in 1913, against Kent - County Champions of that season - and took 6 for 43; in the next match he had 4 Derbyshire wickets for 17: then, after he had bowled two maiden overs in the following game, with Gloucestershire, the umpire, in Alletson's words, `told me to stop bowling'. The next year he had bowled and taken two Derbyshire wickets in two overs when the same umpire went to his captain: Alletson was taken off and never played in a first-class match again. Alletson's great innings was played at Hove on Saturday, May 20, 1911, a Saturday, in those days the third day in county fixtures. When the seventh wicket of Nottinghamshire's second innings fell, at twenty minutes to one, they were only 9 runs on. At this point, Alletson came in: he scored 47 in 50 minutes before lunch, which was taken when Tom Oates was out, at 260 for 9. So Nottinghamshire were 84 ahead with one wicket standing, a situation which promised so quick and easy a win for Sussex that few people were on the ground when play began again, at 2.15 on a dull afternoon. Only one original score - altered and inked over in the Nottinghamshire book - still exists, and many of the timings given in contemporary press reports are manifestly inaccurate. But it is certain that in 40 minutes between 2.15 and 2.55, Alletson scored 142 runs and, with Riley (10), put on 152 for the last wicket. At one point he scored 115 off seven overs, including 34 - 4, 6, 6, 4, 4, 4, 6 - from an over off Killick which included two no-balls. Apart from savage square cuts - one of which wrecked the pavilion bar while another smashed the clock - most of his runs came from long, low drives between mid-on and extra-cover. Tim Killick admitted that he was frightened to bowl at Alletson lest he should hit one straight back at him and injure him. George Gunn, who considered that Alletson, on his day, was the hardest hitter he had ever seen, told me: `He sent his drives skimming; you could hear them hum: the two Relfs and Joe Vine were in the long field and the ball fizzed through them as if they were ghosts.' At one time five balls were out of the ground, lost: but for the time taken to replace them, the innings must have been even faster. A story once gained currency that, after this innings, Alletson tried to play correctly and never played another hitting innings. In fact, his defence had always been orthodoxly sound: and, in his next match - at Bristol - he made 60 in 30 minutes; and in 1913 he made 69 in 47 minutes (v. Sussex), 88 in 60 minutes (v. Derbyshire), 55 in 25 minutes (v. Leicestershire) : in that year, too, he drove three consecutive balls from Wilfred Rhodes for 6. His 189 - the only century of his first-class career-made such an impression that he was chosen for the Test Trial at Sheffield: he scored 15 and 8 and did not bowl, and within a couple of years he had been dropped from the Nottinghamshire side. An unsophisticated but sternly straightforward Nottinghamshire countryman, huge, deep-chested, with an immense (6 feet 6 inch) arm-span, Ted Alletson remains the legendary strong-man figure of cricket.
In the last years of his life, a hip condition left him unable to walk: and
it was heavy going to lift him to a car, to take him out for the trips to his local pub or to Trent Bridge that he enjoyed so vastly. The bat he used on his momentous day hung on the wall of his parlour in Worksop. It has extra thickening in the handle to give his great hands the big grip that satisfied them. He liked to take it down and feel its balance: and he never tired of answering questions in his deep Nottinghamshire countryman's accent about his historic afternoon.
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