George Christopher Collins (21 September 1889 – 23 January 1949) was an English

cricket Cricket is a Bat-and-ball games, bat-and-ball game played between two Sports team, teams of eleven players on a cricket field, field, at the centre of which is a cricket pitch, pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two Bail (cr ...

er, who played

first-class cricket First-class cricket, along with List A cricket and Twenty20 cricket, is one of the highest-standard forms of cricket. A first-class match is of three or more days scheduled duration between two sides of eleven players each and is officially adju ...

for

Kent County Cricket Club Kent County Cricket Club is one of the eighteen first-class county clubs within the domestic cricket structure of England and Wales. It represents the historic county of Kent. A club representing the county was first founded in 1842 but Ken ...

and Marylebone Cricket Club.Carlaw D (2020) ''Kent County Cricketers A to Z. Part One: 1806–1914'' (revised edition), pp. 118–121.
Available online
at the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians. Retrieved 7 August 2022.) Born in Gravesend, Kent, Collins played at both Gravesend and at Cobham, Kent, Cobham, where his father Christopher Collins (cricketer), Christopher had played under the captaincy of Ivo Bligh, 8th Earl of Darnley. His father was subsequently groundsman at the Bat and Ball Ground, Gravesend and later ran a sports outfitters in the town, so it was natural that son should follow father into cricket. He played for junior Kent sides from the age of 16, and made his first-class debut during the 1911 season, in a match against Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, Gloucestershire played in Gravesend. Described in his ''Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, Wisden'' obituary as "a splendid right-arm fast bowler and a useful left-handed batsman", Collins appeared in 218 first-class matches, taking 379 wickets and scoring 6,280 runs. He also occasionally wicket-keeper, kept wicket, claiming a stumping off the bowling of Tich Freeman in a 1922 fixture against Yorkshire County Cricket Club, Yorkshire. His best bowling performance was in 1922, when after taking six wickets in Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, Nottinghamshire's first innings in a match at Dover's Crabble Athletic Ground, he took all ten wickets in their second innings to bowl Kent to an Result (cricket), innings victory. His match figures of 16 for 83 were the second-best match figures for Kent at the time, and remain to this day the sixth-best in the county's history. Outside cricket Collins was a bellringer at Milton-next-Gravesend and an article in ''The Ringing World'' published on 2 May 1913 described him as "hold[ing] the distinction of being, perhaps, the only first-class cricketer who is a bellringer in this country", a photograph was included with the article. A note on a later page of the same issue stated that former Australian captain, Monty Noble, was also a ringer, and had visited a number of towers in England during his tours.

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* {{DEFAULTSORT:Collins, George 1889 births 1949 deaths Kent cricketers Marylebone Cricket Club cricketers Cricketers from Gravesend, Kent English cricketers English cricketers of 1919 to 1945 20th-century English sportsmen