by Chris Waters
Another said to have been at Headingley that day was the novelist J. L. Carr. Born at Thirsk Junction, North Yorkshire, in 1912, “Jim” or James Carr was a keen cricket lover and eccentric character. He was head teacher of a primary school in Kettering until the age of 55 before leaving to devote himself fully to writing. In total, Carr wrote/published eight novels, 20 books of wood engravings, 40 county maps and around 80 small books. There were a number of quirky dictionaries – including, in 1977, his celebrated Carr’s Dictionary of Extra-Ordinary Cricketers. This comprised 126 entries ranging from Dr Arthur Abraham, who “so resembled his twin, a heavy run-getter, that opponents frequently complained to umpires that he had already batted”, to I. Zingari, “a daring boatman who promoted cricket matches on the Goodwin Sands at low tide” and who has “no known connection with a club of that name, founded 1846”. Under the letter V, which included Captain Vinegar, an 18th-century “owner of a bruisers’ agency much employed by cricket game promoters to put down hooligans”, was a brief entry for Hedley Verity. Carr claimed to have left Headingley prior to the 10 for 10 fearing rain and condemned himself to “a lifetime of bitter remorse”. But although Tuesday 12 July 1932 dawned grey and gloomy, the weather brightened appreciably and Carr’s son, Robert, believes that his father – who died in 1994 – might have got his memories muddled. “Was he there? I’m not so sure that he was. Father could be a bit of a romantic. He was a Yorkshireman, of course, and a keen cricket lover, but I never heard him mention the 10 for 10. If he had gone to the game, I’m absolutely certain he would have told me.”
The novelist J. L. Carr, who claimed to have left Headingley prior to the 10 for 10 fearing rain and condemned himself to “a lifetime of bitter remorse”.
Whatever the reality, the fact remains only a privileged few saw Verity spin his way into the record books. Not many could say, à la John Robert Richardson, those magical words, “I was there!”
2
Verity’s Rise
At the time of his record performance, Hedley Verity was 27 and in his second full season of first-class cricket. He was a late arrival to the county game having learnt his trade in the Lancashire leagues. Although born close to Headingley stadium, and raised and schooled locally, Verity only prospered in cricket when he moved to the opposite side of the Pennines. He played for Accrington in 1927 and Middleton from 1928 to 1930, the year he made his Yorkshire debut.
It was while at Middleton that Verity made a momentous decision: he changed from bowling seam to spin. Previously he’d been a medium pacer who’d risen no higher than the Yorkshire second team, but the club had several bowlers like that and he was no better than the rest. To achieve his dream of playing professionally, he was advised by the former Yorkshire and England all-rounder George Hirst – who’d recommended he gain experience in Lancashire and continued to coach him back in Yorkshire – that he’d be better changing his modus operandi. Hirst’s ex-colleague, Wilfred Rhodes, the Yorkshire and England left-arm spinner who’d reigned supreme since Victorian times, was nearing retirement and the club would need someone to fill his shoes.
Verity adapted so well to Hirst’s suggestion he became 10 times the bowler virtually overnight. In 1929, he took 100 wickets for Middleton to top the Central Lancashire League averages and produced a pivotal performance when asked to stand in for the Yorkshire Seconds against an amateur side. After the Seconds scored 420, the amateurs followed-on 229 runs behind and were routed for 56, Verity taking five for seven. Verity’s climb continued when he made his first-class debut in a friendly fixture in May 1930. He returned match figures of three for 96 against Sussex at Huddersfield as the non-playing Rhodes reviewed him through binoculars. A few days later, Verity’s first Championship appearance brought match figures of eight for 60 against Leicestershire at Hull, and he ended the season with 64 wickets at 12.42, topping not only the Yorkshire averages but the national ones too. When Rhodes retired that autumn after taking a world record 4,204 wickets at 16.72, to go with 39,969 runs at 30.81, he handed the baton to Verity in a manner befitting his gruff reputation. “He’ll do,” Rhodes instructed the Yorkshire committee, the cricketing equivalent of a papal decree.
Verity with George Hirst, who advised him to take up spin bowling.
Hedley Verity was born on 18 May 1905 at 4 Welton Grove, Leeds. His father, Hedley Verity senior, was a coal merchant, an occasional lay preacher and chair of the local urban district council. His chief claim to fame – apart from fathering the man who recorded cricket’s best bowling figures – was that he drove one of the first tramcars in Leeds. A little under six feet tall, with a sturdy physique, Verity senior had short blond hair parted from left to right, a black moustache, a square jaw, prominent ears, thoughtful eyes and the look of a man who aspired to make a difference in his local community. When Hedley was two, his family moved one-and-a-half miles south to the suburb of Armley, where his father gained work with a coal firm. Two years later, they relocated seven miles north to the village of Rawdon, where his father acquired one of the firm’s agencies. Verity senior soon gained sufficient supplies to start his own business, which he ran from the family home – Sefton House. A cosy, stone-built cottage once used to weave wool imported from Australia, it still stands near the junction of the Leeds and Harrogate roads.
The young Hedley in his father’s coal cart. Verity senior is pictured far right.
Hedley and his father had a close relationship. It was built on a passionate love of cricket and it was said that Hedley could talk to him freely. His mother, Edith, was the steel of the family. Pretty and petite, with a selfless nature, she ensured that her husband’s customers never wanted for a cup of tea, a slice of cake or just a chat before paying their coal bills. Verity was blessed with a happy childhood. Sefton House was filled with music and he took part in sing-songs with his parents and siblings – sisters Grace (born 1907) and Edith (born 1916). Grace became a schoolteacher in Rawdon, where her pupils included the Yorkshire cricketers Brian Close and Bryan Stott. She loved to tell how the young Hedley tried to swap her for a neighbour’s rabbit, seizing the creature and its hutch and ordering his mother to “give that woman the baby”. Hedley instead got a mongrel called Prince, his inseparable boyhood companion.
Prince received a royal view of his master’s formative steps in the game. He’d watch for hours as Verity bowled pieces of coal at the shed door and practised batting in his bedroom with predictable consequences for the family furniture. The dog accompanied him to his first proper practices at Rawdon Cricket Club, where Verity would toss his coat on the ground and tell Prince to guard it for all he was worth. After practice, Verity would ask his friends to retrieve the coat – and laugh as Prince refused to give it up as though protecting the last bone in Christendom. Verity played his first competitive cricket at Yeadon and Guiseley Secondary School and for Rawdon second team. His first match for the Rawdon first team came as a 16-year-old in 1921. It wasn’t an auspicious start; Verity was bowled for a golden duck and not brought on to bowl. Better results followed, and he was invited to the Headingley nets after being spotted during a scouting programme run by Hirst and Bobby Peel, the former Yorkshire and England left-arm spinner and Rhodes’s predecessor in the county side. Peel, who’d been suspended by the club in 1897 for turning up drunk to a match at Bramall Lane, couldn’t understand why the tall, athletic Verity was incapable of generating significant speed. “It’s a pity,” Peel told him, “you’re a good fast bowler wasted.”
Undeterred, Verity returned to Rawdon and shone with the bat as much as the ball. A tall and technically correct right-hander, he was thought to be a promising batsman before his bowling came to the fore. In 1924, Verity moved to near neighbours Horsforth Hall Park and, in the last of his three seasons with them, took 62 wickets at an average of nine to win the Yorkshire Council League junior prize. A disappointing summer followed at Accrington, where his first professional engagement was undermined by the condescending attitude of senior players,
who didn’t enjoy being coached by a novice. Verity started the season encouragingly but his form tailed off like a shooting star. So much so, the club secretary lamented: “Our choice of professional, so very bright at the opening, did not turn out to be quite the success we had thought. It was very discouraging to the players and undoubtedly had an effect on their play.” Redemption arrived at Middleton, where Verity got on well with colleagues mostly his own age. After an unremarkable first season, when his output was ordinary, the change to left-arm spin worked wonders and signposted the road into the Yorkshire first team. Verity’s apprenticeship – protracted by modern standards – was marked by unusual strength of character. After leaving school at 14, he worked in his father’s coal depot, where everything he did was tailored towards the long-term goal of playing for Yorkshire. Even gruelling manual tasks were performed with the master plan firmly in mind. Verity shovelled extra coal just to improve his strength and stamina and delighted in watching his arm muscles grow. Displaying an appetite for fitness ahead of his time, he undertook rigorous skipping in the house and garden and spent his evenings running around the streets of Rawdon, wearing heavy boots to tire himself out. Although supportive of his son’s ambitions, Verity senior was anxious he had a career to fall back on. He hired a private tutor with a view to helping him gain secretarial and accountancy qualifications, only to be told: “It’s no use, Dad, you’re wasting your money. I’ve made up my mind to someday play for Yorkshire.”
Verity in his days with Yorkshire Colts (Arthur Mitchell is far left of shot).
Verity senior kept a private memoir of his son’s earliest years, which he scribbled on scrap paper in his coal depot. One passage highlights the young man’s self-discipline. “Verity’s time was so fully occupied in the cricket field that he had no time for anything else,” wrote his father. “Any friends he found must, if they wished to retain his friendship, go with him to the cricket field. Some joined the club, but I am afraid most of them found companionship elsewhere. For the same reason he had no girlfriends. He could not afford to waste his time on such business.” Throughout his one-man mission to play for Yorkshire, Verity was motivated by a motto that hung on a plaque above his bed. “They told him it couldn’t be done, he made up his mind that it could – and he did it.”
The side into which Verity brought his 10 for 10 stardust was built along comparable lines. To call it a hard school would be an understatement; the metaphorical cane and slipper were rarely idle in the masters’ studies. In this case, the masters were Rhodes and Emmott Robinson, the latter an equally dour all-rounder who’d broken into the first team in 1919, aged 35, and who’d play until he was 47. Robinson, who scored just under 10,000 runs and took just over 900 wickets with his right-arm fast-medium, epitomised the “give-’em-now’t” philosophy of Yorkshire cricket. Neville Cardus called him “the personification of Yorkshire cricket” and famously wrote: “I imagine that the Lord one day scooped up a heap of Yorkshire clay, breathed into it and said, ‘Emmott Robinson, go on and bowl at the pavilion end for Yorkshire.’” Cardus said Robinson was “as Yorkshire as Ilkley Moor or Pudsey” and insisted “few have absorbed the game, the Yorkshire game, into their systems, their minds, nerves and bloodstream as Emmott did”. Cardus added that the diminutive, bandy-legged Robinson viewed Yorkshire cricket as “a way of living, as important as stocks and shares”.
Emmott Robinson, whom Neville Cardus called “the personification of Yorkshire cricket”.
Verity owed much to the guidance of Robinson and, in particular, that of Rhodes, with whom he played five times during Rhodes’s last season in 1930. Bill Bowes, the Yorkshire fast bowler who made his first team debut the previous year, and became one of Verity’s closest friends, recalled how the two pros collared them on away trips during that 1930 campaign and dissected their performances with surgical precision. These late-night tutorials, enshrined in folklore, were of a type that could scarcely be imagined today, when any young bowler taking a five-wicket haul is immediately hailed “the next big thing”. In his autobiography, Bowes wrote:
Every night at about 10.30 those two would come and collect us in the hotel lounge and off we went to a bedroom. There the shaving stick, toothbrush, hairbrush and contents of a dressing-case would be pushed around the eiderdown to represent the fieldsmen as all our mistakes of the day were discussed in detail. They were hard and exacting taskmasters, but they were right, always right.
Bowes remembered one class particularly after Verity took seven wickets against Hampshire at Bournemouth. Bowes, in contrast, had a disappointing day, managing one wicket:
We found Emmott and Wilfred awaiting us in the lounge when Hedley and I returned from the pictures. “We’ve been waiting a long time – we’d better go, else it’ll take till midnight,” Wilfred growled. What, I wondered, had I done wrong? But there was no comment as we filed from the lounge to the quiet regions upstairs. We entered Emmott’s room and, with a skill born of practice and a thorough appreciation of the job in hand, the masters placed their fieldsmen – the customary toilet articles – in position on the eiderdown. I obviously must be the culprit. My bowling figures for that day had shown 20 overs, four maidens, 43 runs and only one wicket. Hedley could rest assured. He was all right – with 24.4 overs, 11 maidens, 26 runs and seven wickets. But as the toilet articles were placed in position, I saw that they did not represent the field I had been using. “Now then, Hedley,” said Emmott, “what did you do today?” Hedley stuck both his hands into his pockets, stuck out his chest, did a little pleased bend at the knees like a contented father with his back to the fire talking to his son, smiled and replied, “Seven for 26, Emmott.” Emmott smote the woodwork at the foot of the bed in disgust. “Aye, seven for 26, an’ it owt to ‘a’ bin seven for 22! Ah nivver saw such bowlin’. Whativver wa’ t’doin’ to gie AK Judd that fower?”
“How could any young man,” Bowes continued, “coming into such an atmosphere, get a swollen head? Yet they were not ogres, and they believed the best time to tell a lad his failings was when he was riding on top of the world, not when he was down.”
Wilfred Rhodes, Verity’s mentor and predecessor in the Yorkshire side, who took more than 4,000 wickets and scored just under 40,000 runs.
Verity savoured such attention to detail. Rhodes and Robinson’s adamantine assessments chimed with his thirst for self-improvement. Verity wasted no time implementing his teachers’ advice. In 1931, he took 188 wickets at 13.52 to finish second in the national averages to Harold Larwood. He won his first Test cap, against New Zealand at The Oval, collecting four wickets in an innings victory. Verity’s performances that summer saw him named one of Wisden’s Five Cricketers of the Year along with Bowes, New Zealand batsman Stewie Dempster, Sussex all-rounder Jim Langridge and Oxford University batsman Nawab of Pataudi. But the highlight of his first full season came on 18 May 1931, his 26th birthday, when he achieved something that eluded even Rhodes during a career that spanned a record 1,100 games. He took – for the only other time in first-class cricket – 10 wickets in an innings, returning 10 for 36 against Warwickshire at Headingley.
Verity was only the second Yorkshire player to achieve the feat in first-class matches after Alonzo Drake, a left-arm medium-pacer who’d captured 10 for 35 against Somerset at Weston-super-Mare in 1914. Asked to comment on his efforts by the Yorkshire Evening News, Verity – always a reluctant interviewee – said: “Mitchell (Arthur) did some wonderful fielding, and it was one of those rare days when everything is set right for the bowler at one end, but not for the man at the other end.” Verity’s wife, Kathleen, was more loquacious, telling the reporter she’d missed the morning session due to a headache but that Yorkshire’s first home game of the season ultimately proved too great a draw. Mrs Verity said she arrived at the ground shortly after lunch and took her seat inconspicuously in the crowd, adding that it was not long before she was blushing at the favourable comments directed towards her husband. “It is very nice to be a cricketer’s
wife among a crowd when he is in form, but, then, matters might have been quite the opposite, and the comments would have made me blush just the same,” she declared. “Everybody was hoping that ‘Mac’ [George Macaulay] would not take the last wicket, and that seemed to be the general comment. Perhaps ‘Mac’ understood. At all events, he did not take a wicket, stout chap! If my headache had not disappeared by that last over, I had forgotten all about it.” Macaulay, a fiery off-spinner who played eight Tests, was operating at the other end both times Verity took 10 wickets in an innings for Yorkshire. After Verity’s ninth wicket against Nottinghamshire, Macaulay remarked to a team-mate: “If he’s good enough to get nine, let him earn the 10th. I shall get it if I can.”
Verity’s performance against Warwickshire was payback. In 1928, while struggling in his debut season with Middleton, he’d gone for a trial at Edgbaston on the recommendation of Headingley groundsman Ted Leyland, father of Yorkshire and England batsman Maurice. Verity got no joy against a Scottish batsman called Henry Roll, who comfortably countered him on a bone-hard net wicket. It took the Warwickshire committee all of 10 minutes to decide that Verity wasn’t up to scratch. Warwickshire weren’t exactly the shrewdest judges of talent at the time. They also rejected Bowes before his Yorkshire debut, while tucked away in the Edgbaston committee minutes of 4 October 1897 is the immortal line: “It was decided that, on account of the heavy expenses already incurred in connection with next year’s ground staff, an engagement could not be offered W. Rhodes of Huddersfield.” Warwickshire thus turned down the man with the most wickets in the game’s history, the man with the best bowling figures and, in Bowes, a man cricket writer Raymond Robertson-Glasgow called “the most difficult fast-medium bowler in England”. Between them, Verity, Rhodes and Bowes took 7,799 first-class wickets.