Wright Charlie Image 2 Kent 1935

Borstal, Rochester, Kent born right-arm fast-medium pace bowler Charlie Wright played first class cricket for Kent in 225 matches between 1921 and 1931. Wright was also a right-handed lower-order batsman who frequently contributed useful runs. After a few matches in 1921 and 1922, he became a regular member of the Kent team in 1923 and remained a regular choice until the middle of the 1931 season, when he lost form and was dropped, not regaining his place in the side.

Wright and George Collins provided the seam bowling alternative to the spin of Tich Freeman and Frank Woolley which dominated Kent’s bowling across the 1920’s. Both his best batting and bowling performances came in the 1924 season, relatively early in his first class career. Against Essex at Gravesend in June 1924 in the second innings he scored 81, putting on 157 in about 75 minutes for the eighth wicket with the debutant Alan Hilder, which stood as the Kent record for that wicket until 2007. In August of the same year at Taunton, he took five Somerset wickets for 33 runs in the first innings and followed that with 7-31 in the second innings, providing both his best innings and match figures. In 1925, in the match against Warwickshire, Wright was the first victim in a sequence of four wickets in five balls by the Warwickshire player Robert Cooke; in Warwickshire’s second innings, Wright returned the favour with a hat-trick in which Cooke was one of his victims.

Wright’s best seasons as a bowler were 1926 and 1927 and in both of these years he took more than 100 wickets at an average below 21 runs per wicket. His aggregates fell away from 1928 as Freeman came to dominate Kent’s bowling almost single handedly, and he was also more expensive from 1928 onwards. He remained a useful lower order batsman, and passed 50 nine times in all, scoring more than 500 runs in both 1924 and 1929. In his first class career he scored 3,260 runs at an average of 13.06 and claimed 596 wickets at 24.26 apiece, besides his ten wicket match he claimed five wickets in an innings on 22 other occasions and took 127 catches.

NB in the photograph, Wright stands second left with fellow Kent team mates (l-r) Les Ames, Leslie Todd and Bill Ashdown.