Colin Blythe Killed at Passchendaele — Kent and England Spinner, November 1917

Blythe was Kent born and bred. His 215 wickets in the 1909 season is a Kent record. He played the violin to a high standard and was widely regarded as one of the most thoughtful cricketers of his generation.

He had been declared unfit for front-line service because of his epilepsy and posted instead to a railway-construction unit. The unit was supporting the Third Battle of Ypres.

Blythe had played 19 Tests for England between 1901 and 1910, taking 100 wickets at 18.63. For Kent he was the centre of the side that won the County Championship in 1906, 1909, 1910 and 1913. He suffered from epilepsy, which had eventually persuaded him to retire from Test cricket in 1910. When war broke out in 1914 he nevertheless enlisted, eventually serving with the Kent Fortress Engineers. By autumn 1917 his unit was working on the Ypres-Pilckem railway extension behind the front, supplying the Passchendaele offensive. On the evening of 8 November 1917 a German shell burst on his working party at Forest Hall, near Ypres. Blythe and three other men were killed instantly. He was buried at Oxford Road Military Cemetery near Ypres, where his grave is still tended. A memorial at the St Lawrence ground in Canterbury was unveiled in 1919.

“Charlie Blythe was an artist in everything he did.”

Buried at Oxford Road Military Cemetery, Belgium. The Kent committee commissioned a memorial at Canterbury, dedicated in 1919; it remains one of the few permanent county-ground memorials to a single cricketer killed in the war.