Harold William Stephenson was an English first-class cricketer who played for Somerset.
22 Facts About Harold Stephenson
1.
2.
Harold Stephenson captained Somerset from 1960 until his retirement in 1964.
3.
Harold Stephenson holds the county record for the most stumpings in a season as well as most catches in a season.
4.
Harold Stephenson in turn was recruited by Somerset in 1948, having been recommended to the county by Micky Walford, the amateur batsman and schoolmaster who came from Stockton.
5.
Harold Stephenson joined Somerset for the 1948 season, but played in only eight matches.
6.
Harold Stephenson kept wicket in only two of them, and was used mostly as an opening batsman, not with any great success.
7.
That 1949 season set the pattern for Harold Stephenson: he was at or near the top of the wicketkeepers' lists for dismissals for the next decade, setting the Somerset record with 86 dismissals in 1954.
8.
Harold Stephenson passed 1,000 runs for the season for the first time in 1952, and then did so in each of the next four seasons.
9.
Harold Stephenson was first-choice wicketkeeper for Somerset throughout the 1950s, but he missed much of the county's most successful season for 66 years: the 1958 season, when the side finished third in the County Championship.
10.
Combative and chatty, Harold Stephenson stayed in the captain's job for five seasons and was successful: in 1963 he led the side to third place in the County Championship, equalling the best-ever and the team, which had relied across the 1950s primarily on spin for wickets, developed in Ken Palmer and Fred Rumsey two fast bowlers good enough to play fleetingly for England.
11.
Harold Stephenson hit his own highest score, an unbeaten 147 in 200 minutes with one six and 19 fours, against Nottinghamshire at Bath in 1962, within two weeks of his 42nd birthday.
12.
Harold Stephenson played in the first few first-class matches of the 1964 season as Somerset captain and wicketkeeper, but was then injured.
13.
Harold Stephenson appears to have expected to return to both the captaincy and the wicketkeeping role, but he was unable to do so in the 1964 season.
14.
Harold Stephenson continued to live in Taunton, but from 1965 to 1968 played regular Minor Counties cricket for Dorset.
15.
Harold Stephenson was a character in a side that, in Somerset's bad days of the 1950s, was unusually short of personalities.
16.
Harold Stephenson made his wicketkeeping reputation standing up to the stumps and taking tricky spin bowling from Johnny Lawrence, Ellis Robinson, and later Colin McCool, but in his 40s he proved he was no slouch standing back to faster bowlers as Somerset's attack turned successfully to seam in the early 1960s.
17.
Harold Stephenson set the county records for stumpings in a season, in 1949, and for catches in a season, in 1963, as well as for the most dismissals in a season.
18.
Harold Stephenson set the county record for the number of career dismissals, was the first to make six dismissals in an innings, and equalled the county record of nine dismissals in a match.
19.
Harold Stephenson was highly rated by his colleagues as a wicketkeeper.
20.
Harold Stephenson "batted with an exciting, slightly reckless relish that seldom rejected the gamble of a perilously possible single," says the history of Somerset cricket.
21.
Harold Stephenson was very much one of the professionals and even as captain had little time for the stuffier county cricket element.
22.
Cricket writer David Foot in an obituary of Harold Stephenson reported "one corrosive exchange with the county chairman, Bunty Longrigg".