Kent County Cricket Club's 1906 season was the seventeenth season in which the county competed in the County Championship and saw the side win their first Championship title. Kent played 25 first-class cricket matches during the season, losing only four matches overall, and only two matches in the 1906 County Championship. They finished equal on points with Yorkshire and Surrey but won the title on the percentage of finished matches won.
Wisden Cricketers' Almanack considered that there was a "general consensus" Kent were "the best county side of the year" and that they had "shown the most brilliant form", whilst The Guardian wrote that "a more brilliant side it would be hard to imagine". The title was sealed with a final game victory by an innings against Hampshire, the team's twelfth successive victory. Two of the county's players, Arthur Fielder and Kenneth Hutchings were selected as Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1907 as a result of their performances during the season.
The Championship victory was the first of four by Kent during the Golden Age of cricket in the years leading up to the First World War. It was celebrated by the club by the commissioning of a famous oil painting, Kent vs Lancashire at Canterbury, which now hangs in the Long Room in the Lord's Pavilion.
Background
After dominating county cricket in the early years of Queen Victoria's reign, the players who made up Kent's great side of the 1840s retired and by the 1850s the county had been reduced to often having to amalgamate with other sides to produce a challenging team. The formation of a County Club in Maidstone in 1859 and the amalgamation of this with the original Kent Cricket Club in 1870 to create the modern Kent County Cricket Club, provided the basis for re-emergence, although the club suffered from financial instability and Lord Harris's view was that Kent could not hope to compete at the level it once had throughout the 1870s and 1880s. When the County Championship was formerly established in 1890 Kent were initially able to finish only in mid table.
The establishment of the Tonbridge Nursery in 1897 as a player development centre for young professionals was one of the key developments that lay the foundations for the successes of the pre-war period. The Nursery, which was run by Captain William McCanlis and set up and overseen by Tom Pawley, who became the club's general manager in 1898, provided coaching and match practise for the young professionals who, by 1914, had become the basis of the Kent team, gradually taking the place of the amateurs who had dominated the Kent teams of the 1870s and 80s. By 1906 around 60% of all appearances were by professionals, with bowlers such as Colin Blythe and Arthur Fielder forming the core of the Kent attack. Professional batsmen such as Punter Humphreys and James Seymour became an increasingly important part of Kent's batting lineup, coming together with a group of "gifted" amateurs Mid table finishes followed between 1901 and 1903 before the side finished third again in 1904 in the first year of C. H. B. Marsham's captaincy. A sixth-place finish in 1905 saw Seymour, Ted Dillon (who would go on to captain the county) and Arthur Day all score over 1,000 Championship runs and Blythe take 130 wickets. The season had also seen the debut in the Kent Second XI of a young Nursery professional named Frank Woolley.
1906 season
Kent started the season with a match against the MCC at Lord's which they lost by 69 runs. The first four County Championship matches of the season saw losses to Yorkshire and Lancashire, a draw with Essex and a sole win away at Sussex. These were the only losses the side would suffer in the Championship during the season and a run of four wins, including a one wicket win against Surrey which is generally considered the turning point of the season, and three draws led up to the visit of the touring West Indian side to Catford in mid July. A victory by an innings and 14 runs was the first of twelve successive wins leading up to the end of the championship season.