Colin Cowdrey

I have seen this plaque on the wall of a Tonbridge School building before and thought - OK so he went to school here, so did loads of well known people, why does Colin Cowdrey deserve a plaque. 

This weekend I read a piece about his connections with Kent and decided it was worth blipping after all and he does deserve the plaque.     
For anyone interested this is what I read:-  
Michael Colin Cowdrey (1932-2000). Although he was born in India, he can rightly be claimed as one of the county’s most famous sons, if only by adoption.  He was sent to England by his parents from India in 1946 where he enrolled as a boarder at Tonbridge School. Within a very short time after settling in he demonstrated outstanding ability as a cricketer; he was a formidable batsman and no mean bowler, with a devastating leg-break delivery which left many an opposing batsman awestruck.  In 1950 he was appointed Head of School and, in the same year, he made his first appearance as a member of the Kent cricket team.  In 1951 he went up to Oxford and captained the university team in 1954,the same year that Len Hutton included him in the England team as it prepared for the MCC tour of Australia.  The trip turned out to be a watershed in Cowdrey's life; not only did he help England win the Ashes but he also decided that the world of academe was not for him and he would be a professional cricketer for as long as the game wanted him.  As it turned out the cricketing world needed him for a long time.  He played for England for the next fifteen years and, from 1957 to 1971, also captained Kent.  He was the first cricketer to play in 100 Test matches and scored a record-breaking total 7,624 runs for England.  The years finally caught up with him and decided that it was time to retire in 1975, but his association with the game he loved continued as he moved over to the administrative side of the sport.  He was knighted in 1992 and elevated to the peerage in 1997- adopting the title Lord Cowdrey of Tonbridge.  In 2000 he suffered a fatal heart attack and the world of cricket was robbed of.one of its greatest ever exponents. He was sadly missed, not only by the cricketing fraternity, but by the nation as a whole.

 With acknowledgements to the "Little Book of Kent" by Alexander Tulloch.