Alfred Mynn

Alfred Mynn (19 January 1807 – 1 November 1861) was an English first-class cricketer during the game's "Roundarm Era".

[1] Simon Wilde wrote of him: "The speed at which Mynn bowled... and his life-size personality captured the imagination of the public in a way no cricketer had before.

They had many children, five of his daughters survived to adulthood and Sarah Mynn outlived her husband by twenty years.

Fred Gale in "Echoes from old Cricket Fields" (Simpkin and Marshall 1871), wrote "I must see another man who stands six-foot two, of gigantic but symmetrical figure, standing up his full height, taking six stately steps to the wicket, and bringing his arm round well below the shoulder, and sending the ball down like a flash of lightning dead on the wicket, before I can ever believe there is or has been a greater cricketer than Alfred Mynn".

Dr Bainbridge of St Martin's Lane and Surgeon Lawrence attended him at the Angel Tavern and debated whether his leg should be amputated.

When told he would lose his leg at the hip, Mynn, a sincerely religious man, asked for a few minutes to say his prayers.

There is no conclusive evidence that he invented leg guards as worn by modern cricketers although there was an anecdote about WG Grace being presented with a pair of Mynn's pads and using them in a match.

This story dates from Fred Gale's book "The Game of Cricket" (1887), published many years after the end of Mynn's career.

As a member of the Leeds and Hollingbourne Volunteers, a rifle corps which was a forerunner of the Territorial Army, he was entitled to a military funeral.

The poem closes with these lines: Mynn is commemorated in Bearsted Kent, where the house in which he lived, Mount Pleasant, can be found.

The village sign of Mynn at Bearsted