American Cricket: Arthur Howell Brockie – 114 Not Out

Martin Chandler | 9:34am GMT 22 March 2026

Published: 2026
Pages: 47
Author: Smith, Steve
Publisher: Private
Rating: 3.5 stars

With this one Steve Smith has taken a break from his efforts to inform us about the cricket tours of North America before the Great War, and particularly the matches in Philadelphia.

Clearly there is a finite number of such tours, and indeed a finite number of cricketers who played for the Gentlemen of Philadelphia. That latter number we know, from this recent publication, is 102. So on the basis that Steve has already published a book on the subject of the most famous of them all, Bart King, he has another 101 potential subjects for detailed biographical studies.

And that is, hopefully, what he intends to move onto and I hope this extended monograph on the subject of Arthur Brockie is going to be the first of a number of similar projects.

As noted King is by a distance the most famous of the Philadelphian cricketers, and the only one who was a world class player. There were however plenty of other fine batsmen and bowlers amongst the 102, and many of them performed their most memorable feats in the First Class arena against those varying touring sides.

So I was slightly surprised that Steve began with Arthur Brockie, a man who only ever played in two First Class matches, both in 1894 when he was just 19. The first of those he shouldn’t even have played in. It was a match between the Gentlemen of Philadelphia and the Players of the USA. The Gentlemen were the team that Brockie was eligible for, but there were travel problems for the Players who were consequently short of men and given Brockie to help make up the numbers. He missed out on a debut century only because he ran out of partners, the Players innings closing with him unbeaten on 96.

Two weeks later two scratch sides led by George Patterson and Arthur Wood met in a First Class fixture. In a remarkable match Brockie, batting at ten for Patterson’s side, got some more red ink, 18 this time, which explains the sub-title. He left the First Class game whilst still a teenager and without an average.

Which begs the question as to why that happened? I had imagined that Brockie had perhaps turned to a life of crime, or somehow discovered fame or notoriety in some other field of human endeavour. But it seems not and the need to earn a living and following a successful career as an architect is the rather more prosaic explanation.

But despite the absence of any bells and whistles Brockie’s story is an interesting one. Steve’s narrative does dwell on his subject’s cricket, but he also explores the rest of his life and, as Brockie died in 1946, long after cricket in Philadelphia had withered on the vine, his obituarists did not dwell on his cricketing prowess. It is certainly an interesting story and, being a great fan of cricketing biography, I hope there are plenty of similar projects to come.