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Alexander Stuart (Alec) KENNEDY

With a full name like Alexander Stuart Kennedy it is perhaps unsurprising that ‘Alec’ Kennedy was born in Scotland although his family came to England when he was a young boy so Alec was, to all intents and purposes, a Southampton cricketer. He came to the county in his teens and was one of Hampshire’s youngest ever debutants at 16 when, in 1907, he became the third of Hampshire’s four great professionals (with Mead and Newman, followed by Brown in 1908) who helped to transform Hampshire from one of the weak sides into a team good enough to challenge the best.

Alec Kennedy was an archetypal English medium-fast bowler who formed a formidable partnership with Jack Newman. When his career concluded, 29 years later, Alec Kennedy had taken 2,549 wickets for Hampshire – a record only beaten by a very similar bowler, Derek Shackleton. Furthermore, when Kennedy’s wickets for other sides is taken into account, his career total of 2,874 places him sixth in the all-time first-class records with Shackleton next, 27 behind him.

Kennedy was then a great bowler and yet that total of wickets includes just 31 for England in the five Test Matches when he toured South Africa in 1922/3 and took them at an average of 19.32. He never played for England again. The figures also include 10-37 for the Players against the Gentlemen in 1927 at the Oval – the only Hampshire bowler ever to take ‘all ten’ in an innings although sadly not for the county.

Despite his youthful debut he was 21 before he first took 100 wickets in a season, followed by 82 in 1913 and then 162 in 1914. Unfortunately, just when he was approaching peak performance he lost four years to war. When he returned, he took more than 100 wickets in 13 of the next 14 seasons – more than 200 in all matches in 1922. Meanwhile, he also performed pretty well with the bat, concluding his Hampshire career just short of 15,000 runs at an average approaching 20, including ten centuries and a highest score of 163* v Warwickshire at Portsmouth in 1923. Against the same opponents on the same ground, he took 7-8 in 1927 and also took 8-11 against Glamorgan at Cardiff in 1921. His best bowling for the county, of 9-33 v Lancashire at Liverpool in 1920, has been bettered only three times since.

Alec Kennedy achieved the all-rounders’ season ‘double’ in 1921, 1922, 1923 and 1928 and three times took a hat-trick. Wisden selected him, somewhat belatedly, as one of their five Cricketers of the Year in 1933 and described him as a “great but unlucky bowler”. Even in his last full season, 1934, he was just a handful of runs and wickets short of another ‘double’ – he was 43. At the end of that season he took a coaching position at Cheltenham College where he coached the future Hampshire captain EDR Eagar and continued to play in the holidays for his old county for two more years. After the war he coached in South Africa until 1954 when he returned to Southampton and ran a shop in Bargate, happy to talk cricket until his death aged just 68.