The Spin | Alfred Mynn: a cricketing colossus who fell foul of the amateur code

Remembering a great on the anniversary of the day cricket scrapped the distinction between amateurs and professionals

It was on this day in 1962 that the Advisory County Cricket Committee decided to scrap the distinction between amateurs and professionals and henceforth refer to all cricketers simply as “cricketers”. The tradition had long since ceased to be meaningful – the word “shamateurism” had already been in use for nearly 80 years – but that decision marked the official conclusion of the era of gentlemen and players, one that already snaked back more than 150 years and had helped to define some of the game’s greatest players and most memorable characters.

Alfred Mynn is not the most obscure of cricket’s amateurs, but he is surely among the greatest and most memorable. The tributes published after his death, almost exactly 101 years before that meeting of the ACCC, make that perfectly clear. “Not only [was he] one of the best cricketers that ever played for Kent but one of the most kindly-disposed, generous, large-hearted, noblest-formed men that ever trod the green turf so dear to cricketers,” wrote a Sporting Life correspondent. “His name will be handed down,” said the South Eastern Gazette, “not only as one of the best and worthiest cricketers, but as one of the most kindly-disposed and generous individuals that ever stepped foot on a cricketing ground.”

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