All Round Genius

'If Max Woosnam had never been born,' says the author, someone would surely have invented him'. He was no relation to the golfer Ian Woosnam - the only well-known sportsman to go by that name - but in his time he was immeasurably more remarkable. He was an all-rounder to rank, or even out-rank, Ian Botham, Denis Compton or Daley Thompson, but such was his modesty - and the sheer range of sports to which he turned his hand - that no-one has ever heard of him. As a schoolboy, he scored 144 against MCC at Lord's. He played football before the First World War for the then-significant team Corinthian Casuals and toured Brazil with them. Then he fought alongside Siegfried Sassoon for four years on the Western Front. Back at Cambridge he earned no fewer than six Blues in everything from Cricket to Golf and Squash. Then he played for Chelsea - as an amateur. Then he signed for Manchester City, and in 1922 was capped for England. He won an Olympic Gold medal in 1920 - at tennis, and won the Wimbledon doubles title the following year.
He won a shooting gold medal at Bisley, he scored a 147 maximum at snooker, and he challenged and beat all-comers at table tennis armed only with a bread knife. But all the meanwhile he held down a full-time job at ICI, sitting on the board in later life before dying in 1965...