Tom Walker 'Old Everlasting' — The Last Hambledon Hand in the 1800s

The Walker brothers came from Thursley in Surrey rather than Hambledon proper, but joined the Hambledon eleven in the late 1770s and stayed with it through the great years. Tom was known for his stoic temperament, his enormous hands and his weathered face — Nyren said he looked 'like an old gnarled oak'.

By 1800 the Hambledon Club proper had collapsed and Walker had moved his cricket centre to Surrey. He continued to play for England, Surrey, and various made-up sides through the early 1800s, mainly at Lord's Old Ground.

Tom Walker (16 November 1762 - 1 March 1831) was one of three Walker brothers — with his elder brother John and his younger brother Harry — who played for Hambledon in its great years and continued, often for Surrey, into the 1800s. He was famous in the English game for two things. First, his defensive batting: 'Old Everlasting' could absorb anything bowled at him. The most-told single anecdote of his career is that he once faced 170 balls from David Harris and scored only one run from the lot, surviving every delivery. Nyren wrote that he was as 'imperturbable as a stone wall' and that to bowl him out 'a man might bowl till his hair turned grey.' Second, his pioneering bowling action: in the late 1780s — most likely 1788, with another well-documented experiment in July 1794 — Walker tried to deliver the ball with his arm raised above the elbow, a 'higher arm' style that anticipated roundarm by forty years. The Hambledon Club committee called him for foul play and ordered him to revert to underarm; though he was permitted to demonstrate the action in a single match on Dartford Brent (which his XI won by 53 runs against David Harris's XI), the experiment was rejected. Walker continued to bowl underarm and to bat with his characteristic patience for another fifteen years, playing his last major match in 1810 at the age of 47. He died at Aldenham, near Watford, in 1831, the last surviving senior member of the Hambledon eleven of the 1780s.

“He was the coolest, the most imperturbable fellow in existence. To bowl him out a man might bowl till his hair turned grey.”

“He played at one over from David Harris of one hundred and seventy balls, scoring but one run.”

When Walker died in 1831 he was the last surviving senior Hambledon man. John Nyren, then beginning his memoir, used Walker as a primary source for many of the anecdotes that became The Cricketers of My Time. Walker's bowling experiment was vindicated when roundarm was legalised in 1828 — three years before his death — and overarm in 1864.