Tony Lock was a member of the most famous of all England’s spin-bowling combinations. Lock and Jim Laker were every bit as important a reason for England’s success in the 1950s as the fast-bowling combinations with whom they performed. Both were also devastatingly successful members of the Surrey side who won the county championship in each season between 1952 and 1958. In 1955 alone Lock took 216 wickets at 14.39.
Lock in his prime was reddish-haired and fiery, an orthodox slow left-arm bowler with a rapid faster ball and a fast bowler’s spirit. His appeals would rent the skies above the Oval and his flexible frame would bend back in anguish, one hand thrown across his eyes, if a batsman narrowly escaped him with a fortuitous edge. He spun the ball sharply, especially, if by no means exclusively, on the sometimes dusty Oval pitches of his era. But his consummate skill was proved later when he rejuvenated Leicestershire with his vibrant personality and shrewd captaincy in the mid-1960s and when he did the same for Western Australia, for whom he played from 1962 to 1971.
The latter achievement was perhaps his most remarkable, because the word had got round that Lock threw his quicker ball – a legacy, it is thought, of winter practice in nets with a low roof – and he remodelled his action to get wickets by flight and guile where once they had come from potency of spin. When he retired after seventy-four matches for Western Australia, he had taken more wickets for them than anyone.
Lock’s wonderful agile close fielding, notably at short-leg, was his other special glory, though his orthodox right-handed batting was often useful to Surrey and England, not least against the West Indian fast bowlers in England in 1963 and again in the Caribbean in 1967–68 when he was called from Australia to play in the last two of his forty-nine Tests.
He took all ten Kent wickets at Blackheath in 1956, the year in which Laker twice performed the same amazing feat against the Australians. Only eight bowlers, two of them also left-arm spinners, have taken more wickets in a career than his 2,844. Lock would have played in even more Tests but for another left-arm spinner in Johnny Wardle of Yorkshire, a generally better bowler on hard wickets overseas, though not, perhaps, than the bowler Lock himself became on those sorts of surfaces in the second phase of his colourful career.
Graham Anthony Richard Lock: b Limpsfield, Surrey, 5 July 1929; d 30 March 1995