Walter Keeton

Keeton made his debut for Nottinghamshire's second eleven in 1925 and the following year made his first-team debut, playing in two County Championship matches as a lower middle-order batsman. The Nottinghamshire side of the late 1920s was a settled and successful unit under the captaincy of Arthur Carr, with apparently ageless batsmen such as George Gunn, Wilfred Payton and the slightly younger William Whysall, Willis Walker and Carr himself dominating the batting line-up. Keeton and other young batsmen such as Charles Harris and George Gunn junior were given few first-team opportunities, and Keeton played in just five games in 1928 and two in the Championship-winning season of 1929 – one of those two was against Oxford University – and none at all in both 1927 and 1930. During the 1930 season, Nottinghamshire announced that it would no longer regularly select Gunn, who was 51 at the time, and Payton, who was 48, after the end of the season in order to open up places in the side for younger batsmen; when Whysall, a "stripling" of 43, died unexpectedly following a fall in November 1930, the county decided not to reverse the policy, and accordingly in the 1931 season new players came into the team, among them Keeton. (In practice, the policy was modified and Gunn played fairly regularly in 1931 and 1932, and Payton was also recalled for a few matches in 1931.) Promoted to open the innings (often alongside Gunn), Keeton responded with an unbeaten century in the game against…

Both right-handed opening batsmen, Keeton and Harris shared more than 40 century partnerships and emerged from their years of opening the Nottinghamshire batting together with similar aggregate and average records. But they had very dissimilar styles and temperaments. Writing of Harris, the journalist and cricketer R. C. Robertson-Glasgow wrote: "Harris is a dreamer. He is a strange addition to Walter Keeton as they walk out to open an innings; Keeton strung up, concentrated, quick-glancing; Harris serenely distrait, revolving idealistic strokes against an attack that will not occur; lagging sometimes a pace or two behind, like a boy with parent on an unwilling Sunday walk." Where Harris was seen as "enigmatic", likely to block a full toss or to fashion an on-drive off an unplayable delivery, Keeton was consistent and reliable, though his range of strokes was very wide. Almost all of Keeton's best batting was done within the confines of the County Championship for Nottinghamshire: all of his 54 centuries were for the county, and all but one (the 200 not out against Cambridge University) were in Championship matches. For Nottinghamshire, his batting average was a shade over 40; his comparative lack of success in his few other matches brought his career average back to 39.53. In addition to his batting, Keeton was also highly rated as an outfielder, often at third man; he was not a bowler at all, and took only two wickets in his entire career, both of them in the last throes…

Keeton was born at Shirebrook, a mining community south-east of Chesterfield in Derbyshire. His parents were William and Mary Ann and both they and Keeton's older sister Doris were born at Eckington, another mining village to the north-east of Chesterfield; by the time of the 1911 census, the family was settled at Forest Town, a mining community in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, where Keeton's father was employed as a stallman in a mine. Keeton remained in the Mansfield area all of his life and died at Forest Town. He married Florence E. Russell in the Mansfield registration district in 1929.