Alan Lake Hilder (8 October 1901 – 2 May 1970) was an English amateur

cricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striki ...

er who played

first-class cricket First-class cricket, along with List A cricket and Twenty20 cricket, is one of the highest-standard forms of cricket. A first-class match is one of three or more days' scheduled duration between two sides of eleven players each and is officiall ...

between 1924 and 1930. He played primarily for

Kent County Cricket Club Kent County Cricket Club is one of the eighteen first-class county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales. It represents the historic county of Kent. A club representing the county was first founded in 1842 but Ke ...

. He was born in Beckenham, then part of

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

, in 1901.Alan Hilder

CricInfo ESPN cricinfo (formerly known as Cricinfo or CricInfo) is a sports news website exclusively for the game of cricket. The site features news, articles, live coverage of cricket matches (including liveblogs and scorecards), and ''StatsGuru'', a d ...

. Retrieved 4 November 2017.Carlaw D (2020) ''Kent County Cricketers A to Z. Part Two: 1919–1939'', pp. 92–93.
Available online
at the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians. Retrieved 7 August 2022.) Hilder was educated at

Cottesmore School Cottesmore is a Preparatory school (UK), preparatory school in the United Kingdom, founded in 1894. It is full boarding school, boarding. History Cottesmore was founded by Geoffrey Davison Brown in 1894 in Hove, East Sussex. He named the school ...

and Lancing College. He played cricket for both, heading the batting averages for Lancing in 1920, and played for Kent's Second XI later the same year for the first time.Alan Holder
Obituaries in 1970, ''

Wisden Cricketers' Almanack ''Wisden Cricketers' Almanack'', or simply ''Wisden'', colloquially the Bible of Cricket, is a cricket reference book published annually in the United Kingdom. The description "bible of cricket" was first used in the 1930s by Alec Waugh in a ...

''. Retrieved 4 November 2017.Alan Hilder
CricketArchive. Retrieved 4 November 2017. He made his first-class cricket debut for Kent in June 1924 against

Essex Essex () is a county in the East of England. One of the home counties, it borders Suffolk and Cambridgeshire to the north, the North Sea to the east, Hertfordshire to the west, Kent across the estuary of the River Thames to the south, and G ...

Gravesend Gravesend is a town in northwest Kent, England, situated 21 miles (35 km) east-southeast of Charing Cross (central London) on the Bank (geography), south bank of the River Thames and opposite Tilbury in Essex. Located in the diocese of Ro ...

. He scored a century in Kent's second innings of the match and set a Kent record for the 8th wicket in first-class cricket which stood until 2007, scoring 157 runs in partnership with

Charlie Wright Charles George Wright (born 11 December 1938) is a former professional footballer and manager. Born in Scotland. He gained the name "wonder boy" after a great trial game for Morton against Queens Park (B Division 1955/56). He continued with his ...

. This was Hilder's only century of his career and he was considered to have "never afterwards approached that form". He played 14 times for Kent, his final match coming in 1929. Hilder toured

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...

in 1926/27 and 1927/28 with teams led by

Lionel Tennyson Lionel Hallam Tennyson, 3rd Baron Tennyson (7 November 1889 – 6 June 1951) was known principally as a first-class cricketer who captained Hampshire and England. The grandson of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the son of the Governor-Gener ...

, playing eight first-class matches, and in 1928/29 in a non-first-class team led by Julien Cahn. He played his final first-class match in 1930, his only one for MCC, but continued to play cricket for various amateur teams until after

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, including touring Egypt in 1932 in a team led by Hubert Martineau. He died at

St Leonards-on-Sea St Leonards-on-Sea (commonly known as St Leonards) is a town and seaside resort in the Borough of Hastings in East Sussex, England. It has been part of the borough since the late 19th century and lies to the west of central Hastings. The origina ...

Hastings Hastings () is a large seaside town and borough in East Sussex on the south coast of England, east to the county town of Lewes and south east of London. The town gives its name to the Battle of Hastings, which took place to the north-west ...

East Sussex East Sussex is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South East England on the English Channel coast. It is bordered by Kent to the north and east, West Sussex to the west, and Surrey to the north-west. The largest settlement in East Su ...

in 1970 aged 68.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hilder, Alan 1901 births 1970 deaths English cricketers Kent cricketers Marylebone Cricket Club cricketers L. H. Tennyson's XI cricket team English cricketers of 1919 to 1945 Cricketers from the London Borough of Bromley People from Beckenham