The biggest hitter of them all?

Ken Piesse on Cec Pepper

Οne of the most-read and intriguing books in my library is Gerald Brodribb’s Hit for Six, a survey of the great blows of cricket and those who struck them, published in 1960. 

All the most revered big-hitters are included, from CI “Buns” Thornton of Cambridge University, Kent and Middlesex, through to the famed Australians George Bonnor (the Colonial Hercules), Albert Trott and Keith Miller. 

In many cases, Brodribb has included the yardage of their longest and most extraordinary hits, including Thornton’s near-170-yard lift at Hove on August 25, 1876. Brodribb says the ball pitched just near the celebrated early historian Rev. James Pycroft. He noted its exact landing spot and later assiduously measured the distance from crease line to pitching point: 168 yards and two feet, the modern equivalent of 154 metres — the length of the Sydney Cricket Ground and then some. The wild colonial boy Cec Pepper, whose biography I have written, is also mentioned, his lift into Scarborough’s Trafalgar Square in 1945 being measured at 160 yards. 

It seems astonishing now to imagine anyone hitting a cricket ball so far, especially given the thin bats they all used. 

Brodribb stood on the crease line at Scarborough, looking towards the row of boarding houses at long on. “The carry over those houses seems quite impossible,” he wrote in Hit for Six. 

Eyewitness Mr FS Earp of Clevedon called it a “stunningly huge hit.” His letter was included years later in Wisden Cricket Monthly in January 1990. “The ball first cleared a low covered stand, then soared over a brick boundary wall, over a service road and finally cleared a (boarding house) building fully 50 feet high before landing in the square.”

The larger-than-life Cec dined out on that one for years, especially after a lady innocently asked him, “Was it at Lord’s or The Oval?”

Pepper’s thumping straight hits, with just a tilt to the on-side, make him among the most celebrated consistently long hitters in history. 

But that famous Trafalgar Square smite, when he emulated one of Thornton’s most famous on-drives, was not Pepper’s longest recorded hit. 

In the mid-’30s in his home-town of Parkes in the NSW central-west, Pepper lifted an on-drive over the Woodward Park pickets, over the cars behind them, over the tennis courts and onto the road just outside the Parkes’ Showgrounds’ front gates. Later it was measured at a fraction under 165 yards (or 150.7 metres). 

At 183 cm (6ft) and 88kg (14 stone), Pepper was a big man with big hands and exquisite timing. 

Back then, before going to Sydney and beginning a fabulous career which saw him earn unprecedented monies in professional ranks in Lancashire League, a teenage Pep would arrive at games and proclaim: “It’s a great day for a six, boys!”

The only other cricketer to approach Pepper’s hit at that ground was the South African Graeme Pollock, batting at the northern end in 1963-64, in the good old days when touring teams would have full country as well as city programs. 

Was Pepper the biggest Australian-born hitter of all? Maybe. He would have loved to have had the opportunity to use some of today’s bats—especially David Warner’s which, until outlawed, had a ‘sweet spot’ of more than 6 cm in width. 

This article first appeared in the Winter 2018 edition of The Cricket Statistician. To join the ACS and subscribe to the journal, please visit our website.

Long-time ACS Melbourne-based member Ken Piesse’s biography Pep is available from his website.