HE HAS TAKEN more wickets in a Championship season than any other pace bowler since the Second World War. More wickets than any other non-spinner, in fact. Yet when confronted with a random poll few of the correspondents covering England's tour of New Zealand came anywhere near to guessing his name – let alone to recognising the still-muscular figure who watched part of England's matches from the boundary edge at Palmerston North and Wanganui. Which is not so surprising, given that Tom Pritchard was never selected to be one of Wisden's Five Cricketers of the Year in spite of his achievement, or for a Test match.

It is customary when writing of old cricketers to look on the very bright side and to report how sprightly they still are, even when they may be wracked or wrecked by infirmity; for in cricketers we somehow want to see a perfection we do not expect in others. But in the case of the former Warwickshire fast bowler from New Zealand, this is no pretence.

 Tom Pritchard turns 80 on March 10, yet his face is virtually without a line, which is uncommon in New Zealand at most ages. His figure may have a hint of the portly, but it is still so robust that while a dozen overs flat out might be too much, he could still surely manage half-a-dozen, into the wind. Neither he nor I have seen any film of his bowling, but to look at him even now is to picture what one of his deliveries, pitched on an uncovered wicket at Edgbaston and jagging back sharply, would do to unprotected flesh in the era before thigh-pads – and to wince.

`I never tried to hit anybody,' Pritchard declares cheerfully, sincerely. But he did not have to try; he just did. As he fast-forwards through his recollections, as rapidly as he talks, he remembers one time when he broke the fingers of two county captains in consecutive days, and one loses count of his tally of `skullings'. Pritchard recalls how often his own left thigh would be black after batting, so heaven knows how often in 1948 other batsmen were in need of nursing, because Tom Dollery was the only player he knew who used some protection – a towel – for his thigh.

On his first-class debut for Warwickshire, against the Indian tourists of 1946, he bowled Vijay Hazare, Vinoo Mankad and Gul Mahomed in the space of his first seven balls. If Vijay Merchant had not been dropped at gully off his first ball, then Pritchard's debut would have been quite impressive; or, to avoid understatement, it would probably have been the most remarkable debut ever by a bowler for a first-class county. Pelham Warner reported – and Wisden repeated –`a Greasy ball, soft wicket and insecure foothold'. Yet he still finished with figures of 43–19–46–4. Yes, we can accept Pritchard's claim, made without any boastfulness, that he would probably have made some impact if he had been allowed to play for the full Championship season, instead of qualifying for a year by residence. `I'd've taken 200 wickets if I'd played in'46. Nobody could play that year because of the war. No blowing!' he says. `Blowing' is the term which Antipodeans use for an exaggerated claim or hyperbole. Pritchard, it would seem, was the Allan Donald of his day, the fast bowler registered from overseas who was the quickest in England– no blowing.

 IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES of Pritchard's cricket career, chance would seem to have played a larger than normal part. Kiwis claim that a higher proportion of New Zealanders went to the two World Wars than of citizens of any other country on the Allied side: so it was not remarkable that Pritchard should have turned up in the army in Egypt in the 1940s. A lot of cricket was played there at the time, as plenty of first-class cricketers found themselves in that theatre: Jim Laker was one, and, also from Yorkshire, Ron Aspinall; Sam Pothecary and Dudley Nourse too. Pritchard batted above Laker in these games – he was a hitter, as you'd expect – and his hit-the-deck bowling on a variety of pitches succeeded in flooring the odd sergeant and major as they pushed intrepidly forward and took it between the eyes.

Come the `Big Push', and Pritchard was transported to Italy. When, mercifully, the fighting abated, a team of cricketers was assembled from those in Italy in the summer of 1945, and sent to England for a week in August. In Pritchard's case it turned out to be longer. Dollery was another member of this touring team, and as soon as they reached Lord's to practise, under the eyes of Plum Warner, the arrival was announced of `The Taranaki Terror'. Immediately Dollery went off to Birmingham to report to whatever remained of the Warwickshire committee, and the county made him an offer which was extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented then and unrivalled since. he was given a five-year contract, at £525 per year, which rose to £625, and this at a time when you could buy a decent house for £200; he was also to have a benefit after five years; and what is more, by the time he was to start in earnest in the April of 1947, he was already 30. And the Warwickshire committee had not seen him bowl a single ball.

In 1947 he would appear to have taken a while to settle into the daily routine. Still, `he often enjoyed deadly spells.' reported Wisden: `There were few men of greater speed in the country.' No such teething troubles applied in 1948: `He was the most successful fast bowler in county cricket. On the lively Edgbaston pitch, in particular, his pace worried even the best of batsmen.' But when I quoted this assessment to the man himself, the part about home pitches struck no chord at all. In the same way that Warwickshire were said to have favoured Donald with pitches designed for him in 1995, so it was with Pritchard, and without tangible proof. The statistics are that in 1948 Pritchard took his record of 163 Championship wickets at 17 runs each; and 73 of them came at Edgbaston, and 10 more in the one other home match, at Coventry: 83 out of 163 in all, not a gross disparity.

It is indisputable fact that he bowled a high proportion of his victims. He used to grip the ball with his middle finger on one side of the seam and his index on the other, and, with this same grip throughout an innings, he would make the ball swing away in his first spell – or at least `shape', or `offer', as they say now – and thereafter jag it back. He never knew why; like Tate and Brian Statham, and plenty of other natural pace bowlers, he just did it. He therefore respected the on-side batsmen most, like Cyril Washbrook, Bill Edrich and Peter May, who would work him to leg with the seam as his spells wore on. In 1948 he bowled 49 of those 83 home dismissals, beginning with five bowled out of six to help Warwickshire to their first victory over Yorkshire at Edgbaston since 1893.

It is a wonder that Wisden did not include him among their Five, but it was a special season, and the Almanack chose five Australian tourists. Pritchard actually bowled 1271.3 first-class overs in all – no-one in the country bowled 1300 – and he was 32 years old. The county's training schedule, he says, was to go Birmingham University in April and do some exercises and play some football for a week, then to bowl and bowl at the nets, perhaps 20 overs per day. Once the season started his fuel was beer, as it supposedly was for Larwood and Voce; and if a physiotherapist nowadays would have a fit, the proof was in the drinking, for Pritchard kept going until a serious rib injury.

In his next three seasons he took 90-odd Championship wickets, over 100 first-class in all each time. The season of 1951 was Warwickshire's, as they became the first team to win the title with a professional captain and an all-professional team. Three of them were New Zealanders– Don Taylor and Ray Hitchcock were the others. Dollery was that leader, and the only big mistake that Pritchard can ever remember him making was in 1953, when he kept Eric Hollies on too long and the Australians just won a famous match. In contributing to their Championship, Pritchard–`this unpredictable cricketer', in Wisden's words – took 38 wickets in 13 matches at 31, then 36 in the next four at 10 each, before injury struck. He had two more half-seasons, and two more non-seasons, before a brief spell with Kent as an amateur in 1956. He finished with 818 first-class wickets at an average of 23, and a batting average of 13.

This was not the end of his bowling, though. He kept playing in the Birmingham League until he was 55, and then for Enville – that village club with a most beautiful ground at old redbrick Enville Hall, to the west of Birmingham – until he was 60. Not until 10 years ago did he return to New Zealand, his English wife Mavis full of apprehension, but not for long. With their daughter Julia, who had captained England's women's cricket team, they chose a five-acre farm on the outskirts of Levin, an hour to the north of Wellington. He had been successful in various businesses in England, his winter jobs varying from manager of an American tyre company to a Stuart Surridge rep, and now he finds pleasure in owning racehorses and betting on them (he has 40-odd winners to his name). In his paddock, beyond the orchard of lemon-trees and behind the greenhouses full of beans and tomatoes, he keeps a couple of horses and chops up carrots to put in their feed and takes the buckets round to them. The high windbreaks of hedge and fir suggest that New Zealand might be a little `wundy', as they say, in winter. In summer, when roadside farms offer for sale fruits of every description, it does seem to justify its self-appellation of `God's Own Country'.

 WHY DID HE never play a Test match? In 1949, the year after his annus mirabilis, he would have been worth a place with the touring New Zealanders. The truth is that he was asked, but was contracted to Warwickshire, and the prospect of a benefit meant a lot in those postwar years when everything was in short supply. It was nobody's fault, just one of those things. His benefit, when it came in 1952, raised the enormous sum for those days of £3800.

But there had been New Zealand's 1937 tour of England– why was he not selected for that one? Admittedly he was only 20 that summer, but he had already served notice of his talent. Playing for Manawatu in the Hawkes Bay Cup, the tournament for minor associations (those outside Wellington, Canterbury, Auckland and Otago, the only first-class sides then), he took 30 wickets at five runs apiece in the previous season. He did not learn the explanation for his omission until he returned to New Zealand to retire: it seems that a couple of country players had already been selected for the party, and there would not have been room, politically, for a third.

Cricket in New Zealand then was not a widespread sport. So little coaching of cricket was there in the countryside that when Pritchard went to primary school, he took up the stance of a right-hand batsman but held the bat with a left-hander's grip: and he scored a century in a primary-school match with his hands the wrong way round, such was the standard. He listened on the wireless to commentary on Australia v England Tests, and was disenchanted to learn later that the sound effects had been faked in the studio. Otherwise there were very few stimuli to play cricket, and he joined the railways for a career. He had one game for New Zealand, against Sir Julien Cahn's XI, before the war came and, in a roundabout way, gave him his opportunity in England.

He nearly never made it in cricket; but then again he could have made it to the very top. Opinion was divided about the relative merits and pace of contemporaries Jack Cowie and Tom Pritchard. Cowie had only nine Tests, but his record was like Richard Hadlee's as far as it went, with five wickets per match at an average in the early twenties. England in the late 1930s no longer had Larwood and Voce; West Indies had Martindale and Constantine; Australia no fast bowler at all except McCormick. If New Zealand had fielded Cowie and Pritchard, it is doutbtful whether they would have had to wait until 1955–56 for their First Test victory. As Walter Hadlee wrote in his autobiography Innings of a Lifetime: `Had Pritchard played for New Zealand in 1937 (and 1949), our performances would have been immeasurably better, to the extent of possibly winning Test matches.' But Warwickshire can be thankful, as much for Pritchard then as Donald now.

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