Who is the County Championship’s most prolific six-hitter? There is a clear winner

Six-hitting is one of the most evocative skills in cricket. But while Wisden catalogues the record holders for most sixes in Test matches and English T20 competitions, it has nothing on first-class or List A one-day games. The reason is simple: T20 cricket has taken place in an age when balls faced and boundaries hit have all been routinely recorded, while most first-class – and a chunk of List A – matches occurred before that became standard. There is enough information to confirm that Pakistan’s Shahid Afridi has hit the most sixes in one-day internationals (351) and all List A matches (488). But would it be possible to find out who has hit the most in the County Championship?

Cricket statistics are built on scorecards, which have evolved over time. The one for Hampshire v England at Broadhalfpenny Down in Hambledon in 1772 – recognised as the birth of the first-class game – has team totals and individual scores, but no details of how wickets fell. When dismissals gradually began to be recorded the following year, the bowler was named only if solely responsible for a wicket (the first lbw does not appear on a scorecard until 1795). So for a catch or a stumping, the credit went to the fielder. Not until the 1840s was the bowler named for all dismissals, and not until the 1860s did conventional bowling figures appear regularly, allowing the calculation of averages. And while we now have details for over 96 per cent of the fall of all first-class wickets, Wisden started publishing them for all matches only in the 1950s.

In 1983 came another big moment: the New Zealand Cricket Almanack published scorecards with minutes, balls faced, fours and sixes. Only in the electronic age, after 2000, did those details became standard. Any historical list of six-hitters before then is inevitably incomplete.

We do now have details for all Test sixes, where Ben Stokes leads the way with 133: most Test scorebooks exist and, where they don’t, newspaper reports are comprehensive. Almost all online Championship scores since 1997 have details of balls faced, plus fours and sixes. Before then, diligent researchers at a few counties have put details on CricketArchive.com. Their work aside, boundaries are available only in match reports, and these are mostly for bigger innings. More information can sometimes be gleaned from official scorebooks, though there are gaps. So it’s simply not possible to produce a list of all Championship sixes. For players without complete records, extrapolations based on innings in which sixes were recorded can provide an estimate – and this was used to arrive at a list of players who might have hit 300.

The first-class six-hitter nonpareil is Somerset’s Arthur Wellard, once described by David Foot as – simultaneously – an England player and a blacksmith village cricketer. His Wisden obituary says he hit “some 500” first-class sixes, and it is unlikely anyone has more. Gilbert Jessop, who struck the ball hard and often, and almost certainly had a strike-rate above 100, played most of his first-class cricket before 1910, when clearing the boundary first counted as six. Before that, it was five; for six, you had to whack it out of the ground.

Wellard was a tall, powerful, well-built man. Primarily a seamer, he took 1,614 first-class wickets at 24. But it was for his roistering feats with the bat – mostly from No.7 or 8 – that he is chiefly remembered, despite averaging less than 20 and scoring only two hundreds. Because he served a two-year residential period to qualify for Somerset, having made little impression with his native Kent – they apparently thought him better suited to the police force – he did not make his debut until 1927, aged 25. And he was unlucky to have played only twice for England, his lone Test six off Australia’s Stan McCabe sailing into the Lord’s Grand Stand. David Frith wrote: “His driving was scientific, not ‘blind’, and epitomised the theory that if a ball was smitten hard and high enough, no fieldsman on earth could stop it.”

Gerald Brodribb, the master chronicler of six-hitters, calculated a more accurate number than “some 500”. This is revealed as 561 in Barry Phillips’s biography, No Mere Slogger. To get an exact figure for Wellard’s Championship sixes required a visit to Taunton. The Somerset collection of scorebooks predates his debut, and Phillips has kept Brodribb’s handwritten season-by-season calculations. This confirmed Wellard hit 484 sixes in the Championship, and 508 in all first-class cricket for the county (Brodribb had made it 510). So his total in all first-class games was 559.

The visit also provided an opportunity to check two more 300-plus candidates: Ian Botham and Viv Richards, though both played for other counties too. Botham hit at least 333 sixes in his Championship career, and is second on the list. But since there are 442 runs (all bar 40 for Worcestershire) for which the scorebooks are either missing or incomplete, his actual figure – assuming a similar rate of scoring – could be close to 345. He hit 80 first-class sixes in the summer of 1985, a record for an English season, beating Wellard’s 66 in 1935. But Wellard topped 50 sixes in a season four times – the only man other than Botham to achieve the feat even once.

Graeme Hick scored prolifically for Worcestershire between 1984 and 2008. The club’s scorebooks from the 1980s are missing, although those from 1991 are at Worcester’s Hive library. Fortunately, Hick’s autobiography, My Early Life, published in 1991, has a comprehensive statistical appendix by Robert Brooke, cataloguing all his first-class innings, with full details of minutes, balls, fours and sixes where he could find them. When, in late 2024, Cricket Archive filled in the gaps for a handful of innings, we could say with certainty that Hick was the third-highest six-hitter in the Championship, with 323.

Two others have passed 300. A check through the scorebooks at Glamorgan – Richards’s other county – confirmed he hit 306 in the Championship, while Philip Bailey trawled through Kent’s scorebooks to find that Frank Woolley managed at least 304. A lot of 1906 scoresheets were missing, as well as the entire book from 1914. But since sixes in 1906 had to be hit out of the ground, it is reasonable to assume he did not hit any that summer. A search through the British Newspaper Archive for reports on all his innings in 1914 found six sixes, which are included in his 304. Thirteen other innings that season, totalling 329 runs, have no details of boundaries, though the match reports of the time normally mentioned sixes.

Gordon Greenidge seemed a possible member of this elite club, but a day at the Hampshire Records Office in Winchester revealed a tally of 279. Warwickshire’s Jim Stewart hit 17 sixes in the match against Lancashire at Blackpool in 1959, a record until 1995, but he didn’t score enough runs overall to be a candidate. Current players don’t feature: sixes may now be more frequent, but there are fewer Championship matches. Other memorable cavaliers – including Arthur Carr, Mike Procter and John Shepherd – are similar to Stewart: lots of sixes, not enough runs.

One feature of Wellard’s batting was that he hit sixes at any stage in an innings. His Championship scores include five 11s containing a four and a six, and he once made an 18 comprising three sixes. Twice he hit five in an over, the second time off Woolley, when he was dropped from the last ball near the sightscreen. That was a first-class record until Garry Sobers took a liking to Malcolm Nash at Swansea in 1968. In fact, 23.83 per cent of Wellard’s runs in scores below 50 came from sixes, rising to 32.48 per cent in scores over 50. Richards, by comparison, tended to hit sixes later in his innings: his Championship scores include a 41 with nine fours, 37 with nine, 38 with eight and 33 with seven, indicating a preference for keeping the ball on the ground early on. His six percentage was 5.80 per cent in scores below 50, and 12.25 per cent above.

In all, Wellard scored 26.80 per cent of his Championship runs with sixes. Of players with at least 2,000 runs, and full details of sixes, only one has a higher percentage: New Zealand all-rounder Andre Adams hit 126 sixes in his 2,751 runs for Nottinghamshire, Essex or Hampshire – 27.48 per cent. Wellard’s overall record of 484 Championship sixes will almost certainly last forever, and it is hard to imagine any others even approaching 300.

Andrew Samson has been working as a cricket statistician since 1988, and has been the official statistician for Cricket South Africa since 1994.

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