John Hickey Part 2 – Anson Teammates

This is the second part of my discussion with Anson legend, John Hickey. In this part John shares some insight into other Anson players from his time in the club. Read the first part to find out more about John’s own playing career and bit more about the club in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.

A lot of the players from John’s time are already famous within Anson because of Lee’s incredible work in compiling The History. We already know so much about these club legends based on their stats. Their names come up in conversation often when talking about the great deeds of the club. What the stats don’t tell us is who these people were, what their characters and personalities were like, what sort of cricket they played, and whether there were other club greats that the stats don’t do justice to. I’m grateful to John for shedding a little bit of light on some of these Anson luminaries.

Long standing records

Going back to the start of the records, one name that often passes the lips of Anson members is Len Wale. One of the standout achievements for the club is his 58 wickets in one season in 1961. It’s the longest standing record in the club and one that will take an incredible effort to beat. 

Len was a medium quick bowler who was very skilful with his accuracy and ability to move the ball around. He seemed to have this remarkable knack of making the ball appear to come off the pitch quicker than how he bowled it through the air. Len took 272 wickets at an average of 12.18. No one in the in the club with more than 60 wickets has bettered that average.

He had hands like dinnerplates and was the only person able to take catches at slip off John when he was rapid. John always seemed to bowl with the shortest boundary behind the keeper and too often, when Len wasn’t playing, the edges behind would end up going to the boundary for four.

August 1966 (and all that)

John didn’t play when Henry Burnham hit the club’s top score of 181 in August 1966. He did watch him bat quite a lot though. Henry played a lot of cricket and was a serious person who didn’t take any nonsense off of people. He was a solid batsman who always opened the batting and occasionally kept wicket. He wasn’t a thrilling batsman but someone who made the most of 60 over cricket to record some good knocks. Still, scoring 181 in any innings would have taken some doing and is an incredible achievement. The rest of the team managed 99 between them that day.

I’m not sure what the Anson team were drinking that month. A couple of weeks before Henry’s 181, Fred Webb took club best figures of 10-49 against Robbialac CC. John didn’t see lots of Fred bowling but didn’t feel he was the greatest bowler. He probably had one of those extraordinary individual moments where everything came right. Maybe Fred’s record of 62 wickets in 81 matches across 10 seasons backs this up. Still, the record is Fred’s, and it is unlikely to be toppled for quite some time.

Unfortunately, Fred suffered a horrible injury at Westcliffe one season shortly after taking the record. A batsman smacked a ball off of John’s bowling straight at Fred’s head who was standing at a short midwicket. It sounded like an awful injury and he didn’t play too much cricket after that.

Cult heroes

Fred Pennicard is a bit of a cult favourite amongst certain Anson members. Fred worked in a fish shop in Epping. John described him as a lovely guy but not a great cricketer. One memory John has of Fred was when John was taking a steepling catch off his own bowling. Fred was also charging in to get it and didn’t hear the call to leave it. With both players looking skywards towards the ball there was an almighty collision. Fortunately both players avoided injury and John still held onto the catch. Fred hadn’t left a great impression upon John, it seemed.

However, it’s reassuring that throughout time, Anson was a place for cricketers of all abilities. Similar to today, acceptance into the team was judged on character as much as anything else. That being said, Fred did take a 5fer and a few wickets and had 7 stumpings. Clearly he could be quite a handy player at times.

Anson’s greatest player?

In The History there is only one person who appears on the list of players to have scored more than 400 runs in a season and take 30 wickets in a season. Mark Halford is on those lists a couple of times. He has even appeared on both for the same season on two occasions.

Mark Halford is probably one of the best all round players to have played for Anson. John remembers him scoring a hundred in his very first game when he was 13 years old. He was a left hander who was very good against quick bowling and scored quickly too. Mark was a powerful player who liked to hit the ball hard. He wasn’t necessarily the best timer of the ball and struggled a bit against the moving ball or when bowlers started taking pace off.

He was a lively bowler too. In his younger years he didn’t always know what to do with the ball to think a batsman out. Having someone of John’s experience fielding at mid-off helped him hone his skill a bit more but mistook John’s years of experience as some form of miracle working.  Harry Harriot was another player who John said benefited from his years of experience and also thought of him as some kind of miracle worker.

With 4,766 runs and 205 wickets Mark Halford appears very high in all Anson records and achievements.

Great all-rounders

Of other all-rounders who played for the club John would rank Johnny Dowsett and Malcolm Dennison very high.

Johnny was a very lively bowler, and he bowled a ball that would scuttle through very, very quickly. He was a decent batsman as well and scored a century against Gants Hill in 1983.

Malcolm was a clever bowler who thought a lot about his bowling and was also a very good fielder. His wickets tally of 329 puts him right up there as one of the best the club has ever had. He was a good captain as well and fulfilled this role over a couple of seasons.

Malcolm was a far better bowler than a batsman but was still decent with the bat, nonetheless. He’s arguably the best Anson batsman not to score a hundred. He did come agonisingly close with a score of 98 also against Gants Hill in 1983.

John Hickey and John Monk have remained close friends and Monky is also one of the clubs great allrounders and another fine batsman not too have made a hundred. Like Malcolm Dennison, Monky was a bowler who made up for his lack of pace with thoughtful and skilful bowling which he used to get a lot of decent batsmen out.

John has a lot of stories about Monky and how he rubbed people up the wrong way, including his own team mates on occasion. You can read a bit more about Monky’s cricketing exploits and his personality in this blog by Greg.

Table tennis to cricket

Monky and John were part of the Anson contingent who also had a lot of success playing table tennis. Excelling in this game probably helped a lot in cricket. This was true in the case of Ian Attridge who was a highly ranked table tennis player in England when he joined the club.  Ian and Monky were part of John’s table tennis team that won the Romford division.

John remembers batting with Ian and seeing how good Ian’s hand eye coordination from table tennis transferred over to cricket. He recalls several incredible knocks from Ian against good opposition. Ian would take fast deliveries off middle stump and knock them to all parts.

Ian had a few decent knocks against Little Thurrock and shared a partnership of 123 with John against them in 1995. John, who was inclined to big hitting, was quite content to let Ian have the strike and watch from the other end thinking ‘how on earth does he do it? It was amazing’.

Ian is the fourth highest wicket taker in the history of the club with 403 wickets and third highest run maker with 8,146. His tally of sixes surpasses everyone by a long way and lets you know all you need to about Ian’s batting style.

The original Anson captain

The History does a very good job at elevating those that have excelled with bat or ball. Conversely, it buries people whose abilities and impacts are not measured by runs or wickets. One such person that I would not have looked twice at in the history is Ron Stringer.

Ron has a rather meagre record of 1,244 runs and 104 wickets across 17 seasons, but John holds him in the highest regard. Ron was captain when John joined the club. It was in that role that he speaks of Ron with such fondness and respect.

John described Ron as a diamond person and a brilliant captain who was exceptional at dealing with other people. He was one of the key ‘fatherly figures’ at the club that John looked up to. John learnt a lot from Ron that he took into his working life about how to work with different people.

“He was the best, captaincy wise, who always had a smile on his face. When things weren’t going well, he’d give you a pat on the back, he would have a laugh, or give you a sweet. That was his sort of thing”

John learnt a lot from Ron that he would take on whenever he was captain of the team. He found captaincy easy because of it. Lots of what John picked up from Ron sounds similar to the advice more recent captains would be aware of, inherited in our era from Monky. Perhaps the legacy and wisdom of Ron Stringer was passed through the generations and is still alive in how we play the game today.

Things like “you can tell in a short time what a batsman has got, where does he play? Leg side? Playing across the line? Right, put one down at cow corner, put one at midwicket. Short backward square not too deep. It’s no good putting them on the boundary, you want them about 10 yards in because if they miss-hit it you want players there to catch it. If they hit it well it probably goes for 6 or 4 anyway.”

I think Ron has been a bit of an unsung hero in Anson over all these years.

What’s it all about Alfie

And what of Anson’s favourite Son, Alf Harrison? It seems that the Alf that we all knew and loved was, more or less, the same as when he was younger. A very good outfielder in his younger days, but when it came to batting there was “a lot of flamboyance and flair but not much connection with bat and ball”. He must have connected with a few to get over 6,000 runs. His best years were still probably before he joined Anson. He scored a few centuries for one of the Co-op teams before they folded.

As for Alf’s bowling, it sounds like the same sort of stuff that I remember, with the ball touching the sky. He didn’t really spin the ball, but John says that Alf was the closest Anson came to having a spin bowler during his time. Though they would only ever give him a couple of overs at a time.

What is nice to hear is that Alf seemed to be the centre of a lot of the fun in the club. John recalls a story about how they turned up at a ground at 10:30 on one day when it had poured down. There was no chance of play. John said to him ‘do you know what Alf, if someone got out there with a broom and a couple of blankets to dry it all down we might be able to play’. The silly old fool only went and did it. Alf’s misses, Pat, came over and said ‘what’s that silly old bugger doing?’ John said ‘I don’t know, he’s got some dopey old idea that he thinks he can dry the wicket out so we can get going’. Pat was furious and sped off home.

Every year, from about January onwards they would go to Chelmsford nets each Monday evening and all sorts of things would happen. They would bury Alf’s car under piles of leaves or put it up on blocks so it couldn’t go anywhere. Alf had a few catchphrases. One that John remembers was down the nets when Alf would always shout out ‘coming through, ready or not’ just as he was about to bowl.

It seems that some things never changed.

Thanks to John

I’m grateful to John for the time he shared with me and for giving us these little insights into players that we already regarded as legends.

I was particularly pleased to learn about the impact that Ron Stringer had on the club, John, and many others. It’s clear in my mind that he is someone who deserves more recognition whenever we talk about legends of the club.

One of the aims of the blog is to tell the stories that stats and scorecards can’t do on their own. I think John has allowed us a little bit of this over a wide period of the clubs’ history. I am sure there are many more stories that John could tell and more players to talk about. It would need a full book to do them justice.

There are some bits and pieces from my chat with John left out here. I’ll look to work them into future blogs and stories.

I hope you enjoyed reading these stories as much as I did talking about them with John.