OFF HIS OWN BAT

The phrase means to do something independently, that is without prompting or assistance.

Example: I didn’t ask her to buy them a present — she did it off her own bat.

The origin of the phrase has its roots in the game of cricket. It refers to a score made off the bat, as opposed to byes and wides.

Renowned cricket historian and statistician Henry Thomas Waghorn was the first to use the phrase in print. He used it in his book Cricket Scores in 1742.

The phrase was extensively used in print in the 19th century and all the known citations have explicit cricket references.

In 1824 Mary Russell Mitford wrote in Our Village: Sketches of Rural Character and Scenery “William Grey got forty notches off his own bat; and that brilliant hitter Tom Coper gained eight from two successive balls.”

In the game of cricket, runs scored off someone’s own bat’ are always worthy than the team getting runs through “extra” form like wides, byes, overthrows or no balls.

The “extra” runs are counted towards the batting side’s score, but it is the runs that a batsman scores ‘off his own bat’ that gain kudos for the player.

The first usage of ‘off his own bat’ as a figurative, that is non-cricket, can be found in Fragment on Irish Affairs by the Rev. Sydney Smith,

May 1845.

“Dr. Hodgson is a very worthy, amiable man... but [I] suppose he had no revenues but what he got off his own bat.”