William Lillywhite, the Nonpareil — Aging Master of Roundarm in the 1840s

Roundarm bowling, with its pivotal change to bowling action, demanded technique that few bowlers mastered fully. Lillywhite combined a high arm with absolute control of length and was widely held up as the model of the action that the law had legalised.

By the early 1840s Lillywhite had been the leading Sussex bowler for two decades. His engagement at Lord's in 1844 brought him into daily contact with the next generation of cricketers.

William Lillywhite was born at West Hampnett in Sussex in 1792, the son of a brickmaker. He bowled medium-pace roundarm with a high arm and immaculate length and was, with John Willes, the principal advocate of the legalisation of roundarm at the elbow (1828) and shoulder (1835). By 1840 he was 48 and physically slowing, but his accuracy was undimmed; contemporaries considered him the most economical bowler in the country. Engaged as practice bowler at Lord's in 1844, he became a fixture of metropolitan cricket and was a member of the inaugural All-England Eleven of 1846, where his line and length were the perfect counterpoint to Clarke's lobs and Mynn's pace. He played his last first-class match in 1853, aged 61, and died the following year. His four sons — John (later the umpire who no-balled Willsher in 1862), Frederick, James and the younger William — carried the Lillywhite name through cricket for another half-century, producing the Lillywhite annuals and the Lillywhite cricket equipment business. The nickname 'Nonpareil' — meaning 'unrivalled' — was bestowed by the press in the 1830s and stuck.

“Length is everything; pace is for boys.”

His son John Lillywhite's no-balling of Edgar Willsher in 1862 — and the legalisation of overarm bowling that followed in 1864 — completed the arc of legislative change that William had begun nearly forty years earlier.