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Bill Ashdown and Bert Wensley beat a team of 11 all by themselves

Bill Ashdown and Bert Wensley walloped the locals, adding 186 in just over 36 overs.

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Bill Ashdown (left) and Bert Wensley thwarted an entire XI of amateurs
Bill Ashdown (left) and Bert Wensley thwarted an entire XI of amateurs

September 4, 1936. Two men — Bill Ashdown and Bert Wensley — defeated a team of 11 men all by themselves. Abhishek Mukherjee looks at a day of drama at Wittersham.

Though a part of Kent, Isle of Oxney is very close to Sussex. The locals, perhaps competent cricketers, often took their bragging beyond tolerance limits of many, especially the landlord of Norton’s Inn, Wittersham. He summoned two Kent professionals — Edward Wenman and Richard Mills — who thrashed a team of eleven by an innings at Wittersham on September 4 and 5, 1834.

About a century later, in 1936, the idea of an encore surfaced. The rules were simple: eleven locals would be pitted against two professionals in a two-innings encounter. The laws were heavily stacked against the professionals:

1. The professionals, being a two-man side, would be bowled out if they lost a single wicket (there would be no “last-man-batting,” a concept quite common in Indian gully cricket, where the last man standing gets to bat alone, often with a permanent non-striker).

2. The professionals would be allowed no extra fielder. In other words, if they had a bowler and a wicket-keeper, then that would be it.

The men who took up the challenge were William Henry “Bill” Ashdown of Kent and Albert Frederick “Bert” Wensley of Sussex. It had perhaps seemed only fair that one man would come from each nearby county.

Ashdown and Wensley

Ashdown played 487 First-Class matches. His career tally read 22,589 runs at 30.73 and 602 wickets at 32.47. Other than DB Deodhar, he remains the only cricketer to play First-Class cricket before World War I and after World War II. Barring Frank Woolley, Ashdown is the only cricketer to achieve the 20,000 run-500 wicket double for Kent.

Wensley played exactly 400 matches, finishing with 10,875 runs at 20.48 and 1,142 wickets at 26.48. The 10,000 run-1,000 wicket double have been achieved by as many as 73 players, but only 4 of them — George Cox, Albert Relf, James Langridge, and Wensley — ever played for Sussex (not including Imran Khan).

In other words, both were more than competent professionals. The local side outnumbered them, but as per Andrew Ward’s calculations they had in their ranks a coal merchant (FGH Pridham, the captain), three gardeners, two carpenters, a hop-dryer, two farmers, a bricklayer (Bill Catt), and a motor mechanic.

D-day

The build-up for the match was tremendous to the extent that even BBC decided to broadcast a radio commentary. The turnout at Wittersham was huge, though no exact figure can be traced. Some sources (including Wisden) mention a crowd of 2,000, while some others mention 4,000 on that day. The prize money, of course, was to go to charity.

Ashdown and Wensley knew they could not afford to go astray with the ball. With the other man stationed behind the stumps, they also knew that they could not afford the innings to be long. So they bowled on, were clobbered on either side of the wicket, but to their credit, they managed to provide breakthroughs at regular intervals.

Pridham and Catt got the locals off to a 39-run opening stand, which was followed by a 63-run partnership between Catt and A Bronham. But neither professional lost heart: in the end they had to bowl only 24.4 overs, and obviously there was no maiden over involved. Ashdown claimed 4 wickets (2 bowled, 1 leg-before, 1 stumped), Wensley had 5 (4 bowled, 1 caught-behind), and there was a run out.

The locals reached 153, Catt scoring 68 of them and A Bronham and P Shanbrooke being the only other ones to reach 20. Though not a high score, Isle of Oxney must have felt confident. After all, they needed to take a solitary wicket before they would get another chance to bat.

Unfortunately, they were no match for the two county professionals. Wensley and Ashdown walloped them, adding 186 in 36.4 overs before Wensley was caught by G Cook off A Bush. He had scored 96 with 13 fours and 3 sixes. Ashdown’s unbeaten 83 had included 14 fours.

Thereafter the rain came down. The match never got underway, and The Professionals won on first-innings lead. Wenman and Mills must have smiled in their graves.

Brief scores:

Isle of Oxney 153 (Bill Catt 68; Bert Wensley 5 for 66, Bill Ashdown 4 for 82) lost to The Professionals 186 for 1 (Bert Wensley 96, Bill Ashdown 83*) on first innings lead.

(Abhishek Mukherjee is the Chief Editor and Cricket Historian at CricketCountry. He blogs here and can be followed on Twitter here.)

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