Tom Caplen (23 November 1879 – 17 April 1945) was an English

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 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 ...

and

Cornwall County Cricket Club Cornwall County Cricket Club is one of twenty minor county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales. It represents the historic county of Cornwall. The team has played in the Minor Counties Championship since 1904 an ...

. He was a right-handed batsman and a right-arm fast bowler. Caplen was born in Rusthall near

Tunbridge Wells Royal Tunbridge Wells is a town in Kent, England, southeast of central London. It lies close to the border with East Sussex on the northern edge of the Weald, High Weald, whose sandstone geology is exemplified by the rock formation High Roc ...

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 1879. He made his only

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 ...

appearance for Kent during the 1897 season aged seventeen.Tom Caplen

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 2017-04-15. He made at least three appearances for the Kent Second XI, the first in August 1895, when he was aged 15.Tom Caplen
CricketArchive. Retrieved 2017-04-15.Carlaw D (2020) ''Kent County Cricketers A to Z. Part One: 1806–1914'' (revised edition), pp. 101–102.
Available online
at the

Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians The Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians (ACS) was founded in England in 1973 for the purpose of researching and collating information about the history and statistics of cricket. Originally called the Association of Cricket Stati ...

. Retrieved 2020-12-21.) Caplen played for Cornwall In 1898 and 1900, making one

Minor Counties Championship The NCCA 3 Day Championship (previously the Minor Counties Cricket Championship) is a season-long competition in England and Wales that is contested by the members of the National Counties Cricket Association (NCCA), the so-called national cou ...

appearance and in 1902 he played for the Madras Presidency against the Oxford University Authentics. He died at

Hove Hove is a seaside resort and one of the two main parts of the city of Brighton and Hove, along with Brighton in East Sussex, England. Originally a "small but ancient fishing village" surrounded by open farmland, it grew rapidly in the 19th cen ...

Sussex Sussex (), from the Old English (), is a historic county in South East England that was formerly an independent medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It is bounded to the west by Hampshire, north by Surrey, northeast by Kent, south by the English ...

in 1945 aged 65.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Caplen, Tom 1879 births 1945 deaths English cricketers Kent cricketers Cornwall cricketers