English cricket's greatest record

New Statesman​

2 days ago

In India's second Test match against England this July, Jamie Smith hit 100 runs in 80 balls. This rapid century equalled Harry Brook's effort against Pakistan in 2022, and was only three deliveries more than Jonny Bairstow's against New Zealand that same summer. Yet none of them matched the record for England's fastest ever century, set 123 years ago by a stocky Gloucestershireman called Gilbert Jessop. His innings in the Ashes series of 1902 came after 76 explosive balls.
Jessop's 104 that August has the added frisson of being integral to an epic England win. On the last day of the fifth and final Test at the Oval in south London, Jessop single-handedly led England from toil to ecstasy with a score of 104 in an hour and a half, providing the platform for a redemptive English win by a single wicket. This extraordinary achievement, which Simon Wilde enthusiastically places within the stentorian energy of the Edwardian period – the end of the Boer War, Edward VII's coronation, the advent of telegraph technology and mass communication – is the subject of Chasing Jessop. The book is a history of that Test match, but also a detective mystery: was it off 76 deliveries that Jessop reached his 100, or possibly fewer?
Jessop's achievement is all the more impressive given that shots crossing the boundary rope without bouncing were only worth four runs rather than today's six. The Oval was also the biggest pitch in the country and bats were shallower and less powerful than now. More importantly, though, pitches were not covered in the run-up to matches, or overnight during them, even when it rained. This meant that batting could be fiendishly difficult, especially when smart bowlers used natural ruts in the deteriorating ground to generate unpredictable bounces. Runs were simply harder to come by in 1902 than in the 2020s. The batting average in the 1902 Ashes series was 20.7. In 2023 it was as high as 32.1.
Jessop was born in Cheltenham in 1874, the 11th of 12 surviving children. He was pulled out of education at 15 when his father, a doctor, suddenly died, forcing him to embark on a career as a trainee teacher. Yet he always had a ball in his hand, and would play cricket with his brothers in their tiny garden. His technique was almost entirely self-taught and, without a pedagogical overseer to knock out his idiosyncrasies, he unfailingly 'went all out for attack'.
Jessop was, to use a pejorative term, a slogger. George Hirst, another star of that 1902 England team, described him as one of the few cricketers who could 'murder the correct theory of the game and get away with it'. Jessop, though modest in his description of his career, wrote that 'a few old-fashioned theorists still shake their heads sadly' but 'it cannot be denied that there is some satisfaction in feeling that you are giving pleasure to the vast throng'.
He used an unusually long bat handle, which allowed him greater flexibility in shot selection, and his distinctive crouching stance when receiving, coupled with a diminutive frame, made him instantly recognisable on the pitch. He refined his technique through the years but the tics that defined his style remained until his retirement from the crease, aged 40. Would Jessop have played 493 first-class matches and hit 26,700 runs without those quirks? He is a monument to autodidacticism, and a reminder that a sprinkling of unorthodoxy is as likely to invigorate as diminish.
Jessop was also one of the last amateur stars, one of four in the England team at the Oval. He played during the transitional period before full professionalisation, at the ebb of the Victorian reverence for dilettantism. Money worries never truly left him, not even after securing a day job on the London Stock Exchange in 1899 and his engagement in 1902 to a woman with a 'good income'. Indeed, Jessop referred to his status as a 'limited-income amateur'. He was frequently 'found' a position as a secretary or treasurer at his county club, Gloucestershire.
Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe
The year 1902, Wilde assiduously reveals, 'had fewer dry days than any English summer in the 20th century except for 1912'. In the Ashes that year, two weather-affected draws, then two Australian victories, had already assured England's defeat in the series by the time of the Oval game. If, for the sake of a dignified defeat, the home team was required at least to win the final Test, they didn't start very well. England's response to Australia's 324 in the first innings was 183 all out. Through patches of rain, a more spirited bowling attack routed the second Aussie innings for 121 – the most important wicket, Victor Trumper's, was enabled by Jessop's pinpoint throw for a run out. This left England with a target of 263 to win. 'No team,' Wilde writes, 'had ever scored so many [runs] to win a Test match in England.'
About two hours later it was 48-5 and all hope had evaporated. Pessimistic onlookers left before lunch, eager to avoid witnessing further humiliation. Then out stepped Gilbert Jessop, mercurial perhaps, but if anyone was capable of dragging England back into the match it was the one they knew as 'the Croucher'. An onlooker described him that day as 'stocking, bull-throated, ruddy, his fierce-looking face set grimly'.
Despite a treacherous pitch in damp conditions, he came out blasting. Seven runs flew off his first three balls – exciting yes, but unsustainable. Members of the crowd thought it inevitable Jessop would get out quicker than he should, as he had in previous matches. A dropped catch off an unwise hoik before lunch seemed to confirm this, though a Reuters journalist wrote over the wire that Jessop was 'going great guns'. He had altered the tenor of the match.
The medium-pace bowling of Jack Saunders became Jessop's chief source of runs. England's saviour hit five consecutive boundary fours off him. 'Saunders began to overpitch as he wilted under the barrage,' Wilde exclaims, ramping up the tension. Jessop had been more cautious with the wilier Hugh Trumble, but he must have known the cricketing gods were on his side when he thumped Trumble into the pavilion twice in an over (both would have been sixes in today's money). Jessop reached his century with another galumphing boundary and took in the adulation for over two minutes.
Though he got out a few balls later, on 104, by poking a catch to short leg, Jessop had transformed the match and made history. He left the crease to an ovation and pats on the back from his opposition, with England 187-7. The Yorkshireman George Hirst helped bring the match home, making 58 himself. The crowd was riddled with anxiety as the chase reached its denouement – 'Men were continually removing and wiping their pince-nez,' noted one Dover observer. Omnibuses and trams that passed the stadium paused by the pitch, while gentlemen in their West End clubs were gripped to the telegraph. The victory, when Wilfred Rhodes struck for a single or four (nobody knew exactly which), captured the mood in a way that all great national sporting events do. Jessop and Hirst were mobbed by the public in a pitch invasion.
Wilde has a pleasing eye for the little details that drive such granular histories, from the travails of the official score-keepers to the slapstick, His Girl Friday-like press room. And he gilds this with archival rigour when leaving behind the narrative to investigate exactly how many balls it took Jessop to score his 100. Despite the period's absence of statistical detail, Wilde manages to unearth two ball-by-ball accounts of Jessop's innings in two different papers that appeared in the days after the Oval Test. Forensically cross-referencing them with more qualitative accounts of the time, and drawing judicious conclusions from minor discrepancies, he deduces that Jessop actually hit his century off between 72 and 74 balls – at least two fewer than the traditional figure of 76. If we compromise at 73, Jessop is lifted even further above Stokes et al, and up to 11th in the all-time international ranking of fastest ever centuries.
This was Jessop's only 100 in 18 Tests for England. His batting average of 21.9 suggests his triumph at the Oval owed more to a fortuitous alignment of circumstance with skill than to a sustainable model of run accumulation. But chance and history decreed that it would occur during a difficult run chase, on a tricky pitch, against tough opposition.
Wilde's book is a corrective to the myth that rambunctious hitting is an historical anomaly. Jessop proves that ye olde batting was not simply a succession of Geoffrey Boycotts plodding their way on a diet of forward defensive strokes and slowly taken tea. In the 21st century, with cricketing authorities obsessed with social media engagement and the supposed attenuation of attention spans, there's a marketeer's instinct to assert that the aggression favoured by today's short-format versions of the game is an innovation. The deck is increasingly stacked in favour of those party run-scorers. Perhaps batsmen should be allowed to demonstrate their craft in trickier conditions. Gilbert Jessop's 123-year-old record is a testament to that.
Chasing Jessop: The Mystery of England Cricket's Oldest Record
Simon Wilde
Bloomsbury, 320pp, £22
Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops
[See also: 150 years of the bizarre Hans Christian Andersen]
Related