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Cranbrook, Kent born Douglas Carr’s brief career was one of cricket’s more remarkable stories. He played as a right-arm medium pace bowler in the early 1890’s at Oxford University while studying at Brasenose College but a football-related knee injury meant he didn’t make any first class appearances. Thereafter he meandered his way through very average club cricket around Maidstone.
In 1908 he decided to experiment with the fairly new googly, and the following May he made such an impact in club games that Kent offered him a trial – he was by then 37. Carr quickly established himself as a member of the Kent side, and by the second week of August had claimed 42 wickets in his first six first class games. He took 5-65 against his old University on debut, and followed with eight wickets for The Players against The Gentlemen. His success brought him an immediate England call-up and having been twelfth man for the match at Old Trafford, in the final Test at The Oval against Australia in August 1909 he took match figures of 7-282, with 5 wickets including Gregory, Noble and Armstrong in the first innings, although his efforts could not force an English victory and the resulting draw meant that the Australians carried off the Ashes. Newspapers and Wisden heavily criticised the England captain Archie MacLaren for over-bowling Carr.
1909 was also Carr’s best in first class cricket as a whole, as he took 95 wickets including an analysis of 8-36 from 28.1 overs against Somerset. He equalled these innings figures three years later against Gloucestershire. He took 60 wickets the following season as Kent won the County Championship title and was named one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year in 1910, and in 1912 he averaged just 12.01 in taking 61 first class wickets. A tail end batsman, Carr never made a half century, his highest effort being 48, averaging just under 9, and in his later years his batting declined even further. In his last significant season of 1913, when Kent again won the County Championship, he scored only 95 runs in 17 innings. In 1914 he played only one match, in late July against Surrey, bowling 28 overs but not taking a wicket..but his career ended with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.
In 58 first class matches he took 534 wickets at 16.72 apiece, with 31 five wicket innings and 8 ten wicket matches.
At the time he reflected: “I was always a leg-break bowler of sorts, but often used to bowl medium-fast stuff. I started trying to acquire the ‘googly’ about four years ago, and practised hard all that winter and the following spring, only to find that directly I had got the offspin I lost the old leg-break entirely – in fact for that season I hardly made the ball turn at all either way. In the following year I got a bit better, and in August 1908 I really got the thing going, and met with some success in club cricket. I am quite certain of one thing, and that is that in a very short time everybody will be quite able to distinguish between the two breaks.”
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