A 13-year old orphan schoolboy’s batting marathon ended when the last man was out, leaving him unbeaten on 628! Arunabha Sengupta looks back at the epic innings which still stands as the highest recorded score in any grade of cricket.
June 27, 1899
Clifton College always had a strong cricketing connection. Not only did WG Grace score as many as 13 of his hundreds for Gloucestershire on the college grounds, he also sent his sons there to complete their education.
However, when the highest-ever innings in any cricket was recorded here, it was not scripted by any of the Grace scions, but by a 13-year old orphan schoolboy. Arthur Edward Jeune Collins was incidentally born in Hazaribagh, India. The son of a judge in the Indian Civil Service, by the time he started at Clifton in 1897, he had lost his parents.
Known to be of reserved nature, he was short, stocky, fair-haired and pale. According to the cricketing wisdom of the institution, he was regarded as talented, but likely to fall short of the highest standards as a cricketer because of his recklessness at the crease.
Yet, captaining Clark’s House against North Town, Collins opened the innings on June 22, 1899, and carried his bat through four playing days and a weekend, ending on June 27 with an unbeaten 628 out of a total of 836.
Curious conditions
True, the game was played on Clifton’s Junior School field, mainly used for the under-14 matches. The playing area was bizarre, only 60 yards long. The boundary on one side was a wall 70 yards away. On the other side, the field sloped away towards a sanatorium in the distance. All hits down the hill had to be run. The hits that reached the boundaries on the other three sides earned only two runs. Besides, the game was played during scheduled break hours on regular school days. But, irrespective of the conditions, 628 takes some scoring.
On the first day, Collins won the toss, and in only 150 minutes, raced to 200 not out. It is reported that he was dropped at 50, 100 and 140, although the roundness of the scores at those critical junctures makes the accuracy of the documentation dubious.
When he resumed the following afternoon, the news of his progress had already travelled far, and many spectators busy watching the battle between the College and the Old Cliftonians on College Close, began to assemble in the junior field. Reporters also got wind of something important in the making. Accordingly, Bristol Evening News noted that Collins hit the ball “into Guthrie Road, sometimes into the churchyard, and not infrequently sending the ball away down towards the sanatorium for five or six.”
The fives and the sixes were all run.
At close on Friday – some five hours after he had started – he was unbeaten on 509, having overtaken AE Stoddart’s world-record score of 485 for Hampstead versus The Stoics in 1886. The 309 scored in a day was something that Don Bradman would repeat at Leeds 31 years later, although in the more sacrosanct conditions of a Test match. The runs had come at the rollicking rate of two a minute.
No breakthrough after the break
This was followed by a weekend break which Collins spent with his guardians at Tavistock, Devon.
On Monday, the game got under way at 12:30. Many thronged to the ground even though Clark’s House was already eight down. In the 55 minutes of play, Collins continued to entertain, moving on to 598 after being dropped again at 556. The day ended at 804 for nine. Tom Redfern, the No 11 eleven, had managed to hang on.
The fourth day’s play, on June 27, again started at half past 12, but the hours were extended to accelerate the match to a finish. Public interest had grown to massive levels and several serious members of the media had made their ways to the ground. In the school, classes were forgotten. Collins now shifted gears to “downright reckless” as he hit out, and was dropped twice more – in the slips on 605 and at square leg on 619. The merciless slaughter was finally brought to an end when Redfern was caught at point by the youngest player on the field, Fuller-Eberle. The two had put on 138 for the final wicket.
In all, Collins batted six hours, 45 minutes, hit one six, four fives, 31 fours, 33 threes, 146 twos and 87 singles. The scorebook still adorns the pavilion at Clifton, but the exactness of the figures is somewhat unconfirmed. Edward Peglar, one of the scorers, said, “the score was substantially correct – 628 plus or minus 20, shall we say.”
The other scorer was JW Hall, and in one of the quaint coincidences of cricket, his father had batted with the majestically named classics scholar and Test cricketer Edward Ferdinando Sutton Tylecote on the same college grounds in 1868 when the latter had set the then world-record score of 404 not out. In 1938, Hall wrote a letter to the Times recalling: “The bowling probably deserved all the lordly contempt with which Collins treated it, sending a considerable number of pulls full pitch over the fives courts into the swimming baths to the danger of the occupants.”
Collins, however, was not done yet. He opened the bowling as well, and took seven for 33 and four for 30, as North Town was bundled for 87 and 61, losing by an innings and 688 runs.
Long innings and short life
The nearest anyone has ever come to beating the score was just two years down the line, when Charles Eady, playing for Break-o’-Day against Wellington at Hobart in March 1902, scored 566 in under eight hours.
Unlike Stoddard and Eady, who played the game at the highest level, including once against each other in the Lord’s Test of 1896, Collins never managed to graduate into First-Class cricket.
The innings propelled him into instant fame, making him as widely known as possible in 1899. However, he quickly came back into the realm of the cricketing mortals.
He remained a good cricketer who once played at Lord’s for the Royal Engineers against Royal Artillery in 1912, scoring 58 and 36. Indeed, after joining the army in 1902, he played cricket quite regularly.
Yet, the several lives that he had enjoyed during his colossal knock did not get metaphorically transferred into his own life. Within a few months of getting married, he became one of the first men to leave to fight in France during the First World War. Lieutenant Collins was killed in action in November 1914, at the tender age of 29.