Bart King
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| Personal information | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Full name | John Barton King | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Born |
October 19, 1873 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
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| Died | October 17, 1965 (aged 91) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
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| Batting style | Right-hand | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bowling style | Right-arm fast | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Role | Bowler | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Domestic team information | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Years | Team | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1893–1912 | Gentlemen of Philadelphia | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 1894 | G.S. Patterson XI | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| First-class debut | September 29, 1893 Gentlemen of Philadelphia v Australians |
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| Last First-class | October 4, 1912 Gentlemen of Philadelphia v Australians |
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| Career statistics | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Source: cricketarchive, August 18, 2007 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
John Barton "Bart" King (October 19, 1873 – October 17, 1965) was an American cricketer, active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. King was part of the Philadelphia team that played from the end of the 19th century until the outbreak of World War I. This period of cricket in the United States was dominated by "gentlemen cricketers"—men of independent wealth who did not need to work. King, an amateur from a middle-class family, was able to devote time to cricket thanks to a job set up by his teammates.
A skilled batsman who proved his worth as a bowler, King set numerous records in the continent of North America during his career and led the first-class bowling averages in England in 1908. He successfully competed against the best cricketers from England and Australia. King was the dominant bowler on his team when it toured England in 1897, 1903, and 1908. He dismissed batsmen with his unique delivery, which he called the "angler", and helped develop the art of swing bowling in the sport. Sir Pelham Warner described Bart King as "one of the finest bowlers of all time", and Donald Bradman called him "America's greatest cricketing son."
King was born in Philadelphia in 1873. Early in his life, he worked in a linen trade. Although this was the family business, his father later allowed him to leave to enter the insurance industry. King was not a member of the and wealthy families of Philadelphia that produced many of the era's top cricketers. King's obituary in Cricket Quarterly suggests that his career in insurance was set up for him by those families to allow him to continue playing the game. In 1913 (or 1911), King married Fannie Lockhart; the marriage lasted for fifty years. King's wife died in 1963, and he died in 1965 in his native Philadelphia two days before his 92nd birthday.
Bart King was regarded by many of his contemporaries as an affable person. Ralph Barker called him the Bob Hope of cricket thanks to his quips and stories. King was also noted for making jabs at opponents, but leaving them laughing at themselves. The same held true when he would question umpires that turned down his appeals. He is said to have spoken for ninety minutes at a dinner during his last tour to England, punctuated every few seconds with laughs. The dinner guests were kept laughing even while King spoke with a dead-pan expression. One man who attended the dinner noted that King "told his impossible tales with such an air of conviction ... that his audiences were always in doubt when to take him seriously. He made their task doubly difficult by sprinkling in a fair mixture of truth with his fiction."
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