Alfred Percy Freeman, known to his family and friends as Alf, but to the cricketing public as ‘Tich’, due to being just five feet two inches tall, was one of the finest leg break and googly bowlers who ever played cricket. Between the First and Second World Wars, he took 3,756 first class wickets, plus 20 in 1914, the second highest number ever. Yet he only played for England twelve times, and was regarded as something of a failure at the highest level of the game. In this article, we will look at Tich Freeman’s life and career, and explore the reasons for his relatively modest Test match record. I will acknowledge from the outset my debt to Freeman’s 1982 biographer, David Lemmon, to whose researches I have added my own exploration of some of the nooks and crannies of Wisden and Cricinfo.
Tich Freeman was born on 17th May 1888 in Lewisham, then in the county of Kent. He arrived in the midst of a cricketing family. His father, Abraham, was a professional cricketer, and later a groundsman at Essex’s then headquarters at Leyton, along with his (Abraham's) brother Edward. Edward’s son, Edward junior, played for Essex and Abraham’s son John (Tich’s elder brother) was wicket-keeper for Essex for twenty seasons. Tich himself joined Essex’s ground staff, but was not offered a further contract and joined Kent in 1912. He made his first-class debut for Kent in 1914, aged 26, taking 20 wickets before cricket was suspended due to the Great War. He was not suited to a military life (or to anything else other than cricket), but joined the army when called up in 1916. After the war he returned to Kent, taking 60 wickets in 1919. Then in 1920 he took over 100 wickets for the first time, and repeated that feat for the next sixteen years. In 1928, aged 40, he took 304 wickets, the most ever in an English season, and he took over 250 wickets in each of the next five seasons – a record that has never been equaled. (a short video of Tich bowling can be viewed here).
Tich was a quiet, reserved and rather unworldly person. He was very popular with his team mates, on account of his modesty, equanimity and capacity for hard bowling work. He deferred to his ‘betters’, the amateur captains and officials who dominated cricket, and in the early years after the war he relied heavily on Kent’s captain, Lionel Troughton, who set his fields and generally acted as a mentor. Away from the game he deferred to his wife Ethel, a formidable lady who managed his life for him, looking after his wages and trying to curtail his main pleasures outside cricket, which were drinking beer and smoking ‘Passing Cloud’ cigarettes. She would meet him at the ground after home games and drive him home (Tich, characteristically, never learned to drive), to make sure that he did not get led off to the pub by his team-mates. He did not socialise much during away games or overseas tours either, preferring to spend hours in the team hotel playing Patience.
In short, Tich Freeman lived to bowl. He did not spin the ball as much as some others, relying on accuracy, subtle variations of line, length and speed, and a well-disguised googly. Over 400 of his wickets came from stumpings; his partnership with Kent’s wicket-keeper Leslie Ames became legendary. He could bat, and even scored a half-century on his Test debut, but was a regular number eleven. Despite his small size, he was a good fielder in the covers. But he never tired of bowling, even when batsmen were scoring heavily against him, sometimes pleading with his captain not to take him off, and he treated his triumphs and his disasters the same, with a minimum of fuss and a trademark hitch of his trousers.
Kent’s bowling attack was not strong during Tich’s time, and he bore the bulk of the work – not that he minded. Thanks to his efforts, and a good batting line-up, Kent did well during the 1920s and early 30s, rarely coming lower than fifth in the county championship though without winning the top prize. Tich’s efforts did not go unrecognised, and he regularly played representative games for the Players versus the Gentlemen, among others. He was one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year in 1923. He also went on four overseas tours: to New Zealand and Australia in 1922-3 (a non-test tour); Australia in 1924-5 and 1928-9, and South Africa in 1927-8. But he only played for England twelve times, taking 66 wickets at an average of 25.86.
Tich and Tests
Freeman’s first experience of test cricket was in Australia, as a member of the 1924-5 England touring party led by Arthur Gilligan of Sussex. There had been two previous Ashes series since the War: in Australia in 1920-1 and in England in 1921. England had lost both series by a wide margin, and the pressure was on Gilligan to redress the balance.
Tich Freeman made his Test debut on 19th December 1924 at Sydney, in the first Test of the series. He was 36 years old. He took 5 wickets for 258 runs in a match that England lost heavily. He was left out of the team for the second test, which England again lost, and was recalled for the third Test at Adelaide. This time he took 3 wickets for 201 runs, in a narrow England defeat. He was dropped for the rest of the series (which Australia won 4-1) – and never played against Australia again.
Tich had to wait three years for his next Test match appearances, which came on a tour of South Africa in 1927-8, captained by the inexperienced R. T. Stanyforth. He did not play in the first two matches, which England won, but played in the last three, taking 14 wickets at an average of 28.50 runs. South Africa drew the third and won the fourth and fifth Tests, levelling the series 2-2.
1928 was Tich’s Annus Mirabilis, when, aged 40, he took 304 first class wickets, a record that will never be beaten. The visiting international side that year was the West Indies, playing their first Test match series. Freeman played in all three Tests, taking 22 wickets at an average of 13.72 each. His exploits during the year made him a certainty for selection for that winter’s tour of Australia, but he did not play in a single Test, in a series that England won 4-1. Tellingly, the only other member of the touring party not to play a Test was Tich’s Kent wicket-keeper, Leslie Ames, despite the team’s captain being the Kent amateur Percy Chapman. What Tich thought of this snub is not recorded – he never complained about his lot (or celebrated his triumphs) – he just got on with his bowling.
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| The
MCC side that toured Australia in 1928-9. Tich and Leslie Ames were the
only members of the party who did not play in any of the Test matches |
Back in England in 1929, South Africa visited for a five-Test series. The first two Tests were drawn without Tich playing, but he was selected for the remaining three Tests. He took 22 wickets in the third and fourth Tests, including 7 for 115 at Headingley and 7 for 71 at Old Trafford, England winning both games. But then he took 0 for 169 off 49 overs in the drawn fifth Test at the Oval – and never played for England again, despite taking over 200 wickets in each of the next six English seasons.
So why did Tich Freeman not play more than twelve Test matches in his otherwise stellar career? Two possible reasons can be dismissed. Firstly, it might be thought that he was too old for Test cricket after 1929, when he was 41. But playing Test cricket into one’s forties was commonplace between the Wars. The year after, 1930, England’s team against Australia included Jack Hobbs, aged 49; Frank Woolley (43); Patsy Hendren (41), and Jack ‘Farmer’ White (39). Tich’s years of greatest success were all after he turned forty.
Secondly, it was not because Tich was a leg break and googly bowler. David Lemmon’s biography of Tich was titled ‘Tich Freeman and the Decline of the Leg Break Bowler’, but while wrist spin was certainly in eclipse in the 1980s, when Lemmon was writing, in the 1920s it was in rude health. The googly had been perfected by B.J.T. Bosanquet less than thirty years before, and many bowlers had success with wrist spin. Indeed, one of the galling things for Tich must have been the number of leg spinners selected for England ahead of him, players with far inferior records to his own.
There were however theories about leg spin and googly bowling that worked against Tich. Wrist spin was regarded as ‘high risk, high reward’ – if a bowler got it right he could take a lot of wickets but if he got it wrong he could be hit for a lot of runs. There was a view at the time (a snobbish and patronising one) that the best wrist spinners were amateurs, for only they, whose livelihood did not depend on cricket, would take the risks necessary for greatest success. Alternatively, wrist spinners should be all-rounders, so that if their bowling failed they might still contribute with the bat. Freeman, as a professional and a tail-ender, fitted neither criterion. Indeed, most of the wrist spinners selected over Tich were either amateurs (Middlesex’s Ian Peebles; Kent’s C.S. ‘Father’ Marriott); all-rounders (Middlesex’s J.W. Hearne: ‘Young Jack’), or both (Surrey’s Percy Fender; Middlesex’s Greville Stevens and (later) Walter Robins). The only professional tailend wrist-spinner picked over Tich was Lancashire’s portly Dick Tyldesley, who somehow played more times against Australia than Freeman, but with no greater success.
Another factor that counted against Tich was the view that he was only effective as a bowler against tailenders or modest county batsmen, and struggled against top-class batters. This view was even expressed by the editor of Wisden, Sidney Pardon, when commemorating him as one of the Five Cricketers of the Year in 1923. It was a label that stuck to him, even during his great years between 1928 and 1935.
So was Tich just a scourge of lower-order batsmen? This is, of course, an empirical question, that with today’s computerised analytics could be answered with a few clicks of a mouse. But analytics (and computers) had not been invented in the 1920s, and some heavily blazered denizens of the Lords Long Room would have probably regarded such systematic intelligence gathering as being tantamount to cheating. In the 1980s (without the benefit of a computer), David Lemmon tallied up the position in the batting order of Tich’s 264 victims for Kent in his record breaking year of 1928, finding that over half batted between one and six, with number five being his most common victim. Tich also took all 10 wickets in an innings three times, in 1929, 1930 and 1931. The sheer number of wickets that he took during his golden years suggests strongly that they couldn’t all have been rabbits (and more than a few great bowlers have boosted their records by bamboozling tailenders).
The starkest fact about Tich’s Test career was that after his first two caps in 1924-5, he was completely cut out of playing against Australia. He hadn’t been a great success, but did no worse than others in a losing side. He was however ignored when Australia visited England in 1926 – even the 48-year-old Wilfred Rhodes was preferred to him in the decisive fifth Test. As we saw previously, he toured Australia in 1928-9, but did not play in any of the Tests. Then, when Australia visited in 1930, Don Bradman was approaching his phenomenal peak. There was a theory that the Don was vulnerable to spin bowling and over the course of the summer England picked five spin bowlers in all – but not Tich Freeman (in a year in which he took over 260 wickets). Even the journeyman Dick Tyldesley played in two Tests. In the event, Bradman scored 974 runs in the five-Test series, which Australia won 2-1.
The cricketing media, and many past and present players, were baffled by Tich’s non-selection, but from this distance it seems clear that after the 1924-5 series, the powers-that-be that ran English cricket irrecoverably turned against Tich and would not allow his selection against Australia under any circumstances, even when the alternative was to select lesser bowlers. Exactly who was responsible and why has never become clear. Presumably, the view that Tich was only effective against lesser batsmen became entrenched. His successes were downplayed and his failures given excessive weight. Probably his quiet, self-effacing temperament was felt to be too mild for the rough and tumble of an Ashes series. Perhaps it was even thought that he was just too...small. Whatever the reason, and who was responsible for it (David Lemmon suspects Sir Pelham Warner, the former England captain and later Test selector and MCC President), the embargo was maintained for the rest of Tich’s career – though he of course never publicly uttered any complaint about his non-selection. He just got on with the job of dismissing batsmen.
The Incontinent Selectors
So Tich Freeman could feel aggrieved that he was only picked for England twelve times. But look closer at the cricketing statistics from the 1920s and 1930s and a more complex picture emerges. Consider the list below, of the seven highest scoring batsmen in first class cricket. The careers of six of them overlapped with that of Tich, and during Tich’s post-war career (1920-1936) these six clocked up 240 Test caps between them, an average of 40 caps each. Jack Hobbs, Herbert Sutcliffe, Frank Woolley, Patsy Hendren and (later) Wally Hammond formed the backbone of the England batting during the 1920s and into the 1930s, with Philip Mead an effective reserve.
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| The seven highest scoring batsmen in first-class cricket. All but W.G. Grace were contemporaries of Tich Freeman |
Now look at the list of bowlers with most first-class wickets. Four overlapped with Tich: Wilfred Rhodes, a great slow left arm spinner before the war but by the 1920s mainly a batting all-rounder; Charlie Parker and Tom Goddard, slow left arm and off spin for Gloucestershire, and Alex Kennedy, a fast-medium bowler for Hampshire. During the same period these five bowlers, including Tich, gained just 30 Test caps, an average of 6 caps each. The best bowlers in the country (in terms of wickets taken) were collectively largely ignored by the Test selectors, while the best batsmen thrived. It was not just Tich who had the right to feel aggrieved.
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| The seven bowlers with the most wickets in first-class cricket, including Tich Freeman. Four others were contemporaries of Tich |
Like Tich, Parker, Goddard and Kennedy were victims of a prevailing prejudice against what we might call ‘the good English county bowler’. All had great records at county level but were deemed to be not incisive enough to thrive at Test level, where the standard of both wickets and batsmanship was higher. There was also the feeling that they would be ineffective outside England. It is an attitude that still prevails today; for example, the Durham bowler Chris Rushworth, a classic English medium-fast bowler in the Alex Kennedy mode, has been one of the highest wicket takers in the County Championship over the last decade, without receiving any Test match calls, or even England Lions games. The same attitude seems to have been applied less to batsmen, who often seem to get the benefit of the doubt when they fail at Test level. It is also assumed that batsmen score most of their runs against specialist bowlers, while, as we have seen, many bowlers’ wickets are thought to be tailenders.
So the four bowlers who took the most first-class wickets during the 1920s and early 1930s (and the most ever) were largely ignored by the Test selectors. This approach could be understood if the bowlers who were selected were successful. But during the 1920s, the bowler who took most Test wickets for England was the Sussex medium-pacer Maurice Tate (118 wickets from 26 Tests), while in second place was...Tich Freeman (66 from 12 Tests). Throughout the decade, the Test selectors were remarkably incontinent in their choices of bowlers, chopping and changing continually and sometimes fielding apparently random combinations of spinners and seamers in successive Tests. Many of the spinners, and not just the wrist spinners, were amateurs, or all-rounders, while Parker, Goddard and Kennedy, all professional tailenders, were ignored as well as Freeman. And apart from Maurice Tate, no bowler did better than Tich. In fact, the only spinner to take more Test wickets than Tich in the inter-war period was Yorkshire’s left-arm spinner Hedley Verity, who took 144 wickets between 1931 and 1939, before being tragically killed in World War Two. The naysayers would of course point out that most of Tich Freeman’s wickets came in England against ‘lesser’ opposition (West Indies and South Africa) – but who knows what he might have achieved if he had been given more chances against Australia?
‘Dunbolyn’
So Tich played no Test matches in the 1930s, but continued to take wickets heavily for Kent during the first half of the decade. Then in 1936, at the age of 48, it finally became apparent that his bowling was losing its bite. In particular, he lost the ability to bowl the googly. At the end of that year, the county offered him match terms only for the 1937 season. Tich declined, and his county career was abruptly over. He was professional for Walsall in the Birmingham and District league for the next two years, then gave up playing cricket.
As previously mentioned, Tich was an unworldly character, and lacked any abilities other than bowling. He was encouraged to try coaching, but his reticence made him unable to engage with or encourage his pupils (his successor as wrist spinner for Kent and England, Doug Wright, recalled Tich giving him just one piece of advice – ‘Keep the ball up to the bat’). He also invested in a sports shop, but had no head for business and was gratefully bought out by his partner in the enterprise. So after cricket there was nothing.
But this is not a tale of sad decline and an old age spent in poverty and obscurity (or self-destructive alcoholism, like his former captain Percy Chapman). Tich had been awarded two benefits by Kent, in 1929 and 1935, both of which had proved lucrative, due to his popularity with the county’s supporters. Ethel invested the money well, and Tich enjoyed a comfortable retirement. Ethel and he moved to a cottage near Maidstone which he named ‘Dunbolyn’. Ethel would drive him to Kent matches, which he would watch from his car, before Ethel drove him home again. Sometimes he would turn out in charity games.
Tich also received offical recognition. In 1946 he was invited to play for an Old England XI against Surrey, a one-day match watched by 15,000 spectators, including King George VI, who was presented to the teams. In 1949, Tich was one of 26 former professional players granted honorary life membership of the MCC (a kind of cricketing Hall of Fame). After his death, on 28th January 1965, aged 76, a plaque detailing his achievements was unveiled at Kent’s Canterbury headquarters.
His funeral was attended by many past and present cricketers, a tribute to his achievements and the esteem in which he was held. He was meek and unassuming to the last. The cortege was late for the service, and one of his contemporaries summed up Tich in an affectionate one-liner:
“Perhaps Ethel wouldn’t let him come”.
Main Reference:
Lemmon D (1982) Tich Freeman and the Decline of the Leg-break Bowler. London: George Allan & Unwin.
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