Albert Edwin Trott was an Australian and English Test all-rounder whose career produced three of the strangest entries in cricket's record book. On 31 July 1899, playing for MCC against the touring Australians at Lord's, he hit a delivery from his fellow Australian Monty Noble high over the new pavilion (opened in 1890), the ball striking a chimney and falling into the garden of the pavilion attendant Philip Need. No batsman has cleared the pavilion before or since.
Eight years later, in his benefit match for Middlesex v Somerset at Lord's beginning 20 May 1907, Trott took 7 wickets for 20 in Somerset's second innings — including a hat-trick (Lewis, Poyntz, Woods) and, four overs later, four wickets in four balls (Robson, Wickham, Bailey, Mordaunt). The final spell counted as a second hat-trick within the same innings. He is one of only two cricketers ever to do so. He famously remarked that he had 'bowled himself out of his benefit', as a longer match would have meant a bigger collection.
His Test career was short — five for Australia in 1894-95, two for England in South Africa in 1898-99, eleven Tests in total — but his county figures were vast: in 1899 he scored 1,175 first-class runs and took 239 wickets, the high-water mark of a Middlesex career that ran from 1898 to 1910. He was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1899.
Final years were grim. Heavy drinking, a failed umpiring spell and chronic dropsy reduced him to penury. On 30 July 1914 — one day before the fifteenth anniversary of the pavilion six — he shot himself in his lodgings at 39 Denbigh Road, Willesden Green. He was 41. His will, scribbled on the back of a laundry bill, left his wardrobe to his landlady.