Wally Hammond

Gloucestershire to England

Walter Reginald Hammond was born in Dover in 1903 and grew up mostly overseas, the son of an army officer, before settling in Gloucestershire as a teenager and qualifying to play for the county he would represent for his entire career. He made his first-class debut for Gloucestershire in 1920 and his Test debut for England against South Africa at Johannesburg in December 1927, scoring 51 and taking five wickets in the match. It was a promising start to a career that would run to 85 Tests, but it did not hint at how completely he would come to dominate the England batting order for the next two decades.

By the time he retired in 1947, Hammond had scored 7,249 Test runs at an average above 58, with 22 hundreds and 24 fifties, figures that placed him among the small handful of batters, alongside Don Bradman, who defined the era. He also took 83 Test wickets and was regarded as one of the finest slip fielders of his generation, a genuine all-round cricketer in an age that prized the type.

The illness that remade him

Hammond's career very nearly ended before it properly began. A serious illness, contracted on a private tour of the West Indies in the mid-1920s, kept him out of first-class cricket for most of the 1926 season and left him weakened for longer. Contemporary accounts describe a young batter who returned from that lost year a different player: leaner, more controlled, and playing with the poised, upright technique that would become his trademark. Whatever the illness cost him, the batting that emerged from it, built around one of the most admired cover drives the game has seen, was the foundation of everything that followed.

Sydney, 1928

Hammond's first great series came on the 1928–29 Ashes tour of Australia, when England won 4–1 and Hammond was the dominant batter on either side. At the Sydney Cricket Ground he made 251, batting for over ten hours across 605 balls in a winning Test, one of five double-centuries and near-double-centuries he would make against Australia across his career. He scored 2,852 Test runs against Australia alone, more than against any other opponent, with nine hundreds, and it was against Australia that his rivalry with Bradman, the two batters who defined the decade, was measured most closely.

He was a heavy scorer against South Africa too, with 2,188 runs and six hundreds including 181 at the Kennington Oval, and he played his part in the bruising Bodyline series of 1932–33, though it was Douglas Jardine's tactics and Harold Larwood's bowling that dominated the headlines from that tour.

The record innings

The innings that defined Hammond's career, and for a quarter of a century defined Test cricket's outer limit, came on the return leg of the same tour party's visit to New Zealand in March 1933. At Eden Park in Auckland, Hammond made 336 not out, then the highest score in Test history, scored at a pace that stunned spectators used to the slow accumulation typical of the period. It stood as the world Test record until Garry Sobers passed it with 365 not out against Pakistan in 1958, a span of exactly a quarter of a century during which no batter in the world scored more in a single Test innings.

New Zealand was kind to Hammond more generally: his 1,015 runs against them came at an average above 112, with four hundreds in only 11 innings, by far his best record against any Test nation. His away record as a whole was extraordinary, 4,245 runs at nearly 70 outside England, comfortably outstripping his returns at home.

Captain and all-rounder

Hammond spent most of the 1920s and 1930s as a professional cricketer, but in 1938 he changed his status to amateur, a step that made him eligible to captain England, which he did in 20 Tests, winning four and losing three. He led the side through the last Ashes series before the Second World War and again on the difficult 1946–47 tour of Australia, England's first overseas tour after the war, by which time Hammond was in his forties and past his best. His final Test came against New Zealand at Lancaster Park, Christchurch, in March 1947, closing a career spread across two decades interrupted by six years of war.

His bowling, medium pace with the new ball, was never more than a supplement to his batting, but it was a serious one: 83 Test wickets, with two five-wicket hauls, including 5 for 36 on his Test debut against South Africa. In an era before covered pitches, when conditions could change violently between sessions, a batter who could also turn his arm over and hold a catch at slip was worth more than his batting average alone suggested.

The record, by numbers

Across 140 Test innings Hammond was dismissed 124 times, for 7,249 runs, an average of 58.5 that has been bettered by only a short list of batters in the history of the game. He made a century roughly once every six innings and passed fifty in a third of his innings altogether. His five highest scores, 336 not out, 251, 240, 231 not out and 227, came against just two opponents, Australia and New Zealand, though on two different continents, a spread that argued against any suggestion that his hundreds were the product of a single flat pitch or a single weak attack. He scored 66 of his 140 innings from number four in the order and another 52 from number three, the positions from which a Test side's best batter is usually asked to bat.

Legacy

Hammond's Test career ended in 1947 and he died in 1965, but the shape of his reputation had already been fixed by contemporaries who, writing without the benefit of television or video, reached repeatedly for the same description: the most complete batter English cricket had produced since W.G. Grace, and the standard against which the country's number threes and fours would be judged for a generation afterwards. The full record, series by series, ground by ground, is on this page, drawn from the same scorecards CricArcade uses to build its matches.

You can see how Hammond's England sides were built on the England team page, and in The Follow-On you can pick an England XI of your own and see whether you can find an innings to match his.

Sources

• CricArcade Test archive: Wally Hammond's full career record on this page
• ESPNcricinfo: Wally Hammond player profile and Test statistics
• Wisden Cricketers' Almanack: obituary of W.R. Hammond