John Willes Bowls Roundarm at Penenden Heath — Kent v England, July 1807

Tom Walker had tried a higher-arm action in the late 1780s and been ordered by the Hambledon committee to revert to underarm. Two decades later, with Hambledon dead and the law in flux, Willes attempted to revive the experiment. Roundarm — the arm at or below shoulder height — gave the bowler more pace and bounce on the rough pitches of the era and was hugely controversial.

Willes had bowled roundarm in club matches in Kent through 1806 and into 1807. The £1,000 stake on the All-England match drew a large crowd and the bowling style was already a talking point in the Kent newspapers before the first ball.

John Willes, a yeoman farmer from Sutton Valence in Kent, had reportedly developed his higher-arm action in the family barn during practice with his sister Christiana, whose voluminous skirts made underarm bowling impossible and forced her to swing her arm at shoulder height. Willes found the action harder to play, adopted it himself, and brought it into match cricket from 1806. The 1807 match against an All-England XIII at Penenden Heath, near Maidstone, in front of a large crowd attracted by the £1,000 stake, gave him his first major-match opportunity. The local newspaper described his 'straight arm bowling' as 'an obstacle against getting runs'. Willes was not no-balled — the law of 1801 said the hand must be below the elbow, and Willes's was just above it; the umpires were not yet ready to enforce the letter of the law. The Kent XXIII won the match. Willes continued to bowl roundarm intermittently for the next fifteen years. He was finally no-balled by umpire Noah Mann at Lord's in the MCC v Kent match of 15 July 1822, after which he is said to have ridden out of the ground on horseback declaring he would never play cricket again — and was true to his word.

“His straight arm bowling was an obstacle against getting runs.”

“He used to ask his sister Christiana to bowl at him; her crinoline skirts made underarm bowling impossible and forced her to bowl with her arm at shoulder height.”

Willes's persistence, combined with the willingness of MCC to tolerate his action through the 1810s, kept roundarm bowling alive in major cricket. By the early 1820s several other bowlers — William Lillywhite chief among them — had adopted similar actions. Roundarm was provisionally permitted by MCC in 1828 and formally legalised in 1835.