A native of West London, his professional football career began as a youth with Queen's Park Rangers in 1907 and, after moving to Brentford, he had spells with Manchester City and Coventry City before returning to Brentford in 1911. He first appears to have come up against Exeter City in a Southern League fixture in September 1911 and, all told, featured in around fifteen fixtures between the two clubs until his retirement from football in1927. The games from 1920 onwards would have been in the Football League.

The Grecian Archive is indebted to Glyn Aubrey, grandson of Eli Bullock (who played for the Grecians in 1921/22), for pointing out that one of these occasions in April 1922 came a week after a soon-to-famous young cricketer had also lined up against Exeter City. This was the unknown eighteen-year-old Wally Hammond, then playing for Bristol Rovers, who is likely to have drawn little attention in comparison to 33-year-old Hendren who had made his test debut in 1920. Little did anybody know that, with Hammond's talent yet to blossom and Hendren's about to flourish with maturity, the two men would be regular England colleagues during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Nor that, as Glyn Aubrey notes, who could have imagined that these erstwhile opponents of Exeter City late in the 1921/22 campaign were to score 337 first-class centuries between them.

Patsy Hendren's cricket career had run parallel with his football following his first-class debut for Middlesex in 1907. It took him until 1911 to become established and, after service in the Great War, he enjoyed particular success in 1919 by which time he had reached his thirtieth birthday. Another excellent season in 1920 saw him selected for the 1920/21 England tour of Australia during which he made his test debut. In total he was to score 3,525 test runs (averaging 47.63) from 51 appearances in an international career that extended to 1935 by which time he was forty-six. With him giving up football in 1927, and playing for Middlesex until 1937, he could eventually look back on twenty years as a professional footballer and thirty years as a cricketer during which time he totalled 57,611 runs in first-class cricket.

Aside from his slightly obscure Exeter City connection through Wally Hammond, he also played test cricket with Les Ames who had faced Exeter City whilst on the books of Clapton Orient in 1930.


Patsy Hendren died in South London in October 1962 at the age of seventy-three. Not officially a dual cricket and football international, he nonetheless played for England in an unofficial Victory football international against Wales in October 1919.