There is a pub in Worksop, Nottinghamshire, that goes by the name “The Innings”. Walk through the door and you will spot a small figure frozen in time. Beneath it reads a name: Edwin Boaler Alletson.
Born 6 March 1884. The plaque beneath tells of a summer afternoon in 1911 when this man did something so outrageous that they named an entire pub after it.
He wasn’t even supposed to be there
Ted Alletson was never meant to be the hero. He was the stand-in, the last-minute replacement after Tom Wass pulled up injured.
Nottinghamshire needed someone to fill in against Sussex at Hove, summer of 1911. They looked down the list and picked Alletson. He was a bowler who could hang around with the bat, nothing more.
In the first innings against Sussex at Hove, Nottinghamshire managed 238. Alletson scratched together seven of them. Sussex replied with 414. The match was drifting toward a routine conclusion.
Then came the second innings. Nottinghamshire slumped to 185 for seven, just nine runs ahead. Dead and buried.
Arthur Jones, the captain, called for Alletson. The young bloke asked what he should do. Jones told him straight, nothing he did would make a blind bit of difference. Alletson thought about this. Then he said he’d give the Sussex bowler Killick some stick.
Forty minutes of chaos
Fifty minutes after he walked out, the lunch bell went. Alletson had 47. He and John Gunn had put on 73 for the eighth wicket. The ninth wicket managed two runs. Then William Riley came in at number eleven.
Riley was a bowler. He averaged about eight with the bat. He was there to block and let Alletson face most of the balls. Except Alletson didn’t want protection. He wanted the strike. Together they added 152 for the last wicket. Riley made ten not out. Alletson got the rest.
Three minutes after lunch, he reached fifty. Thirteen minutes later, he had his hundred. Twenty-four minutes after that, he was out for 189. One hundred and forty-two runs in forty minutes after the break. His only century. His entire career lasted six years. This was the one day that mattered.
Numbers don’t make sense
The mathematics still stagger. One hundred and twenty runs came from the first seven overs after lunch. Alletson made 115 of them. Five-ball overs, remember. Not six.
Killick, the bowler who had drawn Alletson’s particular attention, finished with figures of 20 overs, 130 runs. In one over that contained two no-balls, Alletson hit three sixes and four fours. He took 22 from another. George Leach suffered 34 from two overs of his own.
Eight sixes. Twenty-three fours. Four threes. Ten twos. Seventeen singles.
Eight sixes left the ground. Twenty-three fours. Five balls disappeared entirely. One turned up in the sea, a full mile away. Another was struck so hard it could not be used again. Five were found on the roof of a skating rink outside the ground.
Years later, George Gunn recalled a square cut that smashed through the pavilion window and destroyed the bar clock. Arthur Jones reckoned they should have docked ten or fifteen minutes from Alletson’s innings time just for ball retrieval.
What he got
The Duke of Portland presented him with a gold watch and chain, the date engraved upon it. A cheque for one hundred pounds followed. Big money back then.
Alletson played on for three more years. Never made another century. The World war finished his cricket in 1914. He died in 1964, forgotten mostly, the watch and chain long gone, the money spent.
But the innings stuck around.
The pub
In Worksop there’s a place called The Innings. Walk in and you’ll see a small figure on the wall. Below it: Edwin Boaler Alletson. Born 6 March 1884. The plaque tells the story. People drink there who’ve never seen a cricket match. They ask about the name. Someone tells them.
A bloke who wasn’t meant to play walked out because someone else got hurt. He was told it didn’t matter what he did. So he decided to matter. He made it matter. He made it matter so much that over a century later, people still raise a glass to him in a pub that bears the name of what he did.
He hit the ball so hard they lost five of them. He made 189 runs in under an hour and a half, batting with a number eleven, against bowlers who weren’t bowling rubbish, with a heavy bat and long boundaries.
That is the thing about cricket. Sometimes the scorebook lies. Sometimes the numbers do not capture what happened, how it felt, why people still talk about it when everyone who saw it is long gone.
Ted Alletson played one innings worth remembering. It turned out that was all he needed.