Ingram, Edward A. (‘Eddie’) (1910–73), cricketer, was born 14 August 1910 in 4 Le Bas Terrace, Rathmines, Dublin, third among at least three children of Edward Addison Ingram, a civil servant in the post office, who had been born in England, and Elizabeth Mary Stanislaus Ingram (née Murphy), originally from Co. Wicklow. He was educated at Belvedere College, where he first played cricket with school friend Jimmy Boucher (qv), and formed with him a bowling partnership that would become an outstanding one for Ireland in the years to come. Ingram became a member of Leinster Cricket Club in Rathmines at the age of ten, and his promise as a cricketer was such that he played his first international for Ireland while still at school in 1928. He remained a regular for Ireland for almost twenty-five years. He played forty-eight matches for Ireland, including nineteen first-class games, from 1928 to 1955, captaining the side on eight occasions, and would probably have played many more except that his availability was curtailed somewhat by his move to England in the mid 1930s. One of Ireland's greatest all-round cricketers, in his international career he scored 1,628 runs with the bat, an average of 20.09, and as a bowler he dismissed 151 batsmen at a cost of 20.11 runs each. In 1933, while playing for Leinster CC in the Leinster Senior League, he aggregated 759 runs in thirteen innings, including 213 of his side's 509 for 9 against Phoenix CC. He won the Marchant Cup, a trophy awarded to the best all-round player in the province, in 1932 and 1933. In his club career in England, where he played for Ealing CC, he took over 3,000 wickets and regularly scored over a thousand runs a season. In 1948 he made his first appearance for Middlesex, traditionally one of England's strongest cricket counties, and played in twelve first-class matches for them.
As a batsman he was a late-order right-hander who was more effective at club level. Especially strong on defensive back-play and on the leg side, he was a positive and aggressive striker of the ball, with a savage hook. In 1935 he scored 162 in two innings against the MCC at Lord's. Primarily a bowler, he was an impeccable judge of length and had a variety of bowling techniques, specialising in the art of leg spinning, and when in form he was a threat to the very best batsmen. In later years he developed a leg roll at slow medium pace. Unfortunately his bowling performances were not always matched by his batting colleagues when he played for Ireland. Two of his greatest performances came for Ireland against the visiting Australian side in 1938. In the one-day match he and Boucher bowled the visitors out for just 145 runs but unfortunately Ireland could only muster 84 in reply, with Ingram's 12 the second best total after T. J. McDonald's 28. In the two-day match he took 5 for 18 in just seven overs. That same year Ingram and Boucher took 17 wickets between them in a match against Sir Julian Cahn's XI, including 10 for just 73 runs. In 1949 against Yorkshire he bowled out five batsmen in half an hour for no runs as they went from 286 for 5 to 293 all out. In his international career he scored ten half-centuries, the last coming against India in 1952. He achieved the double of 1,000 runs and 100 wickets in 1947 after thirty-one internationals, becoming only the second Irish player to achieve this feat. He took ten wickets in a match and seven wickets in an innings, both on the same occasion, six wickets in an innings four times, and five wickets in an innings twice. In terms of all-round feats he twice took a fifty and five wickets in an innings in the same match – against Scotland in 1936 and Sir Julian Cahn's XI in 1939.
Widely known in Irish cricketing circles by his nickname ‘Chicken ’, he was affable and rotund, and described as a ‘great character of Pickwickian girth’ (Green, 481). Despite this he was deceptively quick between the stumps. Had he been exposed to a higher standard of cricket from an earlier age he might have become a truly world-class player. In an obituary the Irish Times cricket correspondent, Sean Pender, observed: ‘At Lord's there was a school of thought that had they got him earlier and taught him to bowl more antagonistically he would have ranked with the greatest leg spin operators of all time’ (Ir. Times, 17 Mar. 1973). Ingram was a Guinness employee, and his work brought him to live in London in 1936. He served for a time as president of the Club Cricket Conference, the body that coordinated club cricket activity in the south-east of England. He and his wife Clare had two children. He died 13 March 1973 in Basingstoke, Hampshire.