by Chris Waters
After his 10-wicket triumph against Warwickshire, Verity was acclaimed the new Rhodes. The comparison was understandable but unsuitable; in bowling method and physical appearance, the two were as different as the sun and moon. Rhodes, five feet eight inches, was ruddy-cheeked, flint-eyed and poker-faced. He wore a flat cap pulled tight over his forehead and bowled at an orthodox pace for a slow left-armer. Rhodes tempted batsmen to destruction with a subtlety that belied his sombre exterior. He was adept at flighting the ball and as systematically accurate as a Swiss timepiece. Rhodes’s style was as straightforward as the man; a few short strides to the wicket were followed by a beautifully balanced sideways swing, his right arm high, his left arm low to the grass before he brought it over smoothly, like a see-saw moving from bottom to top.
Verity was six foot one inches and solidly built, tipping the scales at 13 stone. He had an angular face, frank and friendly eyes and, according to Robertson-Glasgow, “the look and carriage of a man likely to do supremely well something that would need time and trouble”. Verity was prematurely grey in his early 20s and exuded wisdom beyond his years. As reserved and reticent as Rhodes was severe, he took a longer run to the crease than his mentor, gliding towards the stumps as a swan glides elegantly along a stream. He approached softly over seven paces, bowled on his toes and followed through with an expectant flourish; his appeals were often so quiet they could only be heard by the batsman and umpire at the non-striker’s end. Whereas Rhodes bowled with his wrist underneath the ball, Verity gripped it tightly across the seam with three fingers so that it barely brushed his palm. He operated at a pace closer to Derek Underwood than that of Monty Panesar and had the ability to make the ball lift. It was Verity’s bounce, as much as his spin, that so inconvenienced batsmen. Verity himself said that he and Rhodes had only two things in common: they bowled left-arm spin and liked taking wickets. Rhodes also rubbished attempts to bracket them. In later years, when asked whether there was any ball that Verity bowled that he himself didn’t bowl, Rhodes replied, “Aye, there was the ball they cut for four.” The implication – beneath the black humour – was that Verity was never a second Rhodes, but always a first Verity.
Wonderful though his form had been in 1931, and despite the flattering if flawed comparison with his predecessor, Verity was by no means certain of retaining his place for England’s next major assignment: the 1932–33 tour of Australia. Not only did he face competition from such as Somerset left-arm spinner Jack “Farmer” White, but the Australian pitches were traditionally unsuited to his style of bowling. Verity went into his record-breaking 1932 season knowing that he would have to produce something truly special to make the trip. Not even in his wildest dreams could he have envisaged how special it would turn out to be.
3
The Background and Build-up
Little Princess Margaret, the daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, has had a new experience. She has been to her first party, and although she was one of the youngest guests invited, she thoroughly enjoyed herself. Princess Margaret, who will not be two until August, was taken to the party with great dignity by her elder sister, Princess Elizabeth. The children were in charge of their nurse. Princess Margaret entered into the fun as soon as she arrived, and she seemed to enjoy every moment of it. She played and romped with the other children, chatting away to them, obviously delighted with her first venture into social life, and her happy laugh and joyful prattle helped to make the afternoon a great success. Princess Elizabeth enjoyed herself too.
Such was the news in the Yorkshire Post on Saturday 9 July 1932, the opening day of the 10 for 10 game. It was a different world, a more innocent world, and newspapers captured that long-lost age. An advertisement in the Yorkshire Evening News, promoting a vacuum cleaner, announced: “No husband can invest 10 shillings to better purpose”, while another proclaimed: “For your throat’s sake, smoke fresh Craven A, made especially to prevent sore throats.” Readers were told: “They do not bring about that unpleasant huskiness of the throat so generally peculiar to some cigarettes.” There were reports that Chelsea Football Club had spent £21,000 on wages, benefits and transfers during the 1931–32 season (around £750,000 today), that Laurel and Hardy were on their way to Leeds, and that arrangements were afoot to present the blind composer Frederick Delius with the freedom of his home city of Bradford. Later that month, Jelka Delius would guide her husband’s hand over the Certificate of Acceptance at their home in Grez-sur-Loing, northern France.
The leading news story came from the shores of Lake Geneva, where delegates at the Lausanne Conference in Switzerland had voted to suspend First World War reparations payments imposed on defeated countries by the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty compelled Germany to accept full responsibility for causing the war and to pay Allied nations around £6.6 billion, but with the world in the grip of the Great Depression, and with Germany unable to service the debt, an informal understanding was reached among Europe’s superpowers that they should instead contribute £150 million to a special fund for the “reconstitution of Europe”, with payments deferred for at least three years. This agreement, reached after weeks of intense negotiation, was hailed a major triumph for Ramsay MacDonald, the British Prime Minister, whose diplomatic skills were widely acclaimed. “The great achievement of Lausanne,” said The Times, “is that one-sided payments from one country to another group of countries, formerly associated in war, have been abolished.”
In Germany, where the Lausanne declaration was broadly welcomed but fervently condemned by Adolf Hitler, the Nazi leader, who refused to recognise the Treaty of Versailles, there was news of violence and mounting unrest. July had begun with bloody clashes between Nazis and Communists and would end with a bitter election campaign that would see the Nazis installed as leading party in the Reichstag, with 230 seats and almost 14 million votes. Although the election result would confirm support for Hitler’s policies, it would be insufficient to realise his dream of becoming Chancellor. “Herr Hitler’s hopes dashed forever,” insisted the Daily Telegraph.
Elsewhere in Europe, France was in mourning after 62 men died when the Prométhée submarine sank during trials off the coast of Cherbourg. Bastille Day celebrations were cancelled in many cities, and King George V sent a message of sympathy to French president, Albert Lebrun. In America, the FBI was reportedly closing in on the killer of Charles Lindbergh junior, the infant son of aviators Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, whose body had been found a short distance from the family home in New Jersey two months earlier. Dubbed “The Crime of the Century” and “The Biggest Story Since the Resurrection”, it would be two years before Bruno Hauptmann, a German carpenter, was arrested and sentenced to death by electric chair. And in China, significant interest had been aroused by the appearance at Shanghai’s Luna Park of Song Shu-teh, purportedly the world’s tallest man at an unlikely nine feet five inches. “Song used to be in the army,” wrote Reuters, “but his friends complained that he drew the enemy’s fire too much for their liking or comfort.” The agency added that Song’s daily meal consisted of 24 large rice puddings, one large chicken and two dozen eggs, and that he had a son who, at the age of four, “had the appearance of a boy in his late teens”.
The sports pages of 9 July 1932 were dominated by the Yorkshire and England batsman Herbert Sutcliffe. At Bradford Park Avenue the previous afternoon, the 37-year-old had become only the seventh man to score 100 first-class hundreds, following in the footsteps of Jack Hobbs, Phil Mead, Patsy Hendren, W. G. Grace, Frank Woolley and Tom Hayward. Sutcliffe’s 132, compiled in a little under two hours and containing eight sixes and eight fours, was acclaimed one of his greatest innings and enabled Yorkshire to set up a mid-afternoon declaration on the final day of their County Championship game against Gloucestershire. With 15 minutes of the match remaining, the visitors had lost only three second-innings wickets and Wally Hammond was in the throes of a stubborn stand with New Zealander Ces Dacre. But two quick wickets prompted Yorkshire captain B
rian Sellers to claim the extra half-hour, and Bill Bowes took the final wicket with just five balls left, yorking Tom Goddard to leave Hammond stranded on 71. George Macaulay returned five for 67 and Hedley Verity four for 54 but Sutcliffe dominated the morning headlines. Proclaiming him “The Bradman of England”, the Yorkshire Evening News enthused: “He hit harder than ever he had done in Yorkshire cricket and – this must be an especial source of satisfaction to him – in gaining honour for himself he had a big hand in the dramatic victory gained by his side. He could not have completed his hundred hundreds in better style.”
Sutcliffe had not stayed to celebrate his triumph. No sooner had the match finished than he’d dashed off to a women’s cricket trial at Headingley, played on the adjacent wicket to the 10 for 10 pitch. The game between the Possibles and Probables had been arranged to assist in the selection of a Yorkshire team to meet Lancashire, and Sutcliffe had been giving the girls batting coaching. The trial ended even more dramatically than the men’s match, the Probables prevailing off the very last ball. Women’s cricket was still in its infancy … the national Women’s Cricket Association had only been formed six years earlier, and it would be another two-and-a-half years before the first women’s Test between England and Australia. J. J. Booth, president of the Bradford Cricket League, summed up the prevailing attitude when he told the Yorkshire Post in July 1932: “Women’s cricket as a public exhibition is on a par with men’s hat-trimming contests. They are both pantomimic entertainments, exploited by men to be laughed at as such women sacrifice their dignity and their highest womanly qualities to make an inglorious holiday.” The lady cricketers coached by Sutcliffe went on to win their Roses game. In another tight finish, they triumphed by five wickets at Headingley with five minutes to spare. “The players behaved in the most decorous manner,” said the Yorkshire Post. “Perhaps the umpires, being men, had something to do with this.”
Sutcliffe’s 100th hundred sustained a purple patch that had swept him to the top of the first-class averages. He was in the form of his life with 1,822 runs at 79.21 – streets ahead of his nearest challenger, Lancashire’s Ernest Tyldesley, who’d scored 1,291 runs at 67.94. During a golden spell in June, Sutcliffe had strung together a Bradmanesque sequence of 789 runs in four innings – including a career-best 313 against Essex at Leyton. In this game, he’d shared in a world record opening stand of 555 with Percy Holmes, which beat the 554 amassed by Yorkshire’s John Tunnicliffe and Jack Brown against Derbyshire at Chesterfield in 1898. The new feat was shrouded in controversy, for after Sutcliffe threw away his wicket thinking the record broken, he posed for a photograph with Holmes in front of the scoreboard only for the 555 to click back to 554. Scorebook discrepancies caused the confusion, which was only resolved when a “missing” no-ball was prudently found. Holmes called the affair “a rare to-do”, while Sutcliffe expressed himself strongly on the subject. Wisden diplomatically stated that “some of the circumstances surrounding this Leyton achievement were not quite desirable”, but added that “whether the record was or was not beaten, there can be no question that the batsmen, had they not felt assured they had beaten it, could have put on heaps more runs”.
Well played, old man. Percy Holmes, left, and Herbert Sutcliffe celebrate their historic stand at Leyton one month prior to the 10 for 10 match.
Just as Holmes and Sutcliffe would provide an astonishing postscript to the 10 for 10 with their century stand, so Verity supplied a stunning footnote to the 555. He followed this partnership with five for eight in the first innings and five for 45 in the second to seal victory by an innings and 313 runs. Verity was again in outstanding form and he went into the historic Nottinghamshire match with 80 wickets at 15.25, including 26 in his previous three games. Verity was fifth in the national averages to Harold Larwood (77 wickets at 10.74), Kent leg-spinner “Tich” Freeman (149 at 12.65), Bill Voce (92 at 13.04) and Middlesex paceman Jack Durston (70 at 14.27). With Sutcliffe unstoppable and Verity unplayable, Yorkshire were on a tremendous run after a terrible start to the season. The champions had won only one of their opening seven games in the 28-match programme and at one stage sat second-bottom of the table – a capital offence in the county of Wilfred Rhodes and Emmott Robinson. Woeful weather played its part; two of those games were washed out as rain lashed the country through much of May, but Lancashire won by an innings and 50 runs at Bradford and Hampshire secured their first victory over Yorkshire for 10 years with a 49-run triumph at Headingley. Yorkshire’s solitary success during this period came against Somerset at Bath, where Verity took nine wickets in a game Yorkshire won by the same margin.
With hopes of a second straight title seemingly over, there had been no stopping Yorkshire thereafter; four successive away wins had laid a foundation from which they never looked back, and they welcomed Nottinghamshire on the back of a 10-match unbeaten run that comprised seven victories and three draws. In a twinkling, Yorkshire had climbed to second in the table and now looked odds-on to maintain a proud record of never having finished lower than fourth since 1911, and only twice lower than fourth since 1892. They’d closed to within 10 points of leaders Kent, who’d thrashed Northamptonshire at Tunbridge Wells the previous day in a game that produced the only other 10-wicket feat of 1932. On the opening day, Northamptonshire’s off-spinning all-rounder Vallance Jupp took 10 for 127 from 39 overs only to be thrillingly upstaged by Freeman, who returned match figures of 16 for 82 to force an innings win.
Yorkshire’s revival was a rousing response to those who’d doubted the champions’ credentials. The club was entering its third and arguably greatest phase, with only the 1950s/1960s combinations led by Ronnie Burnet, Vic Wilson and Brian Close standing comparison. So strong under Lord Hawke at the turn of the century, when they won four Championships in five years, and again in the early 1920s, when they became the first county to win four straight titles, Yorkshire would win a magnificent seven Championships in the nine seasons up to the Second World War. Masterminding their success was a man who, like Hawke before him and Burnet in later times, was paradoxically one of their lesser stars. Brian Sellers was no more than a string of fairy lights compared to the Blackpool Illuminations of Holmes and Sutcliffe, Verity and Bowes, but he made up in motivational acumen what he lacked in playing ability. Son of Arthur Sellers, a former Yorkshire batsman who now chaired the club’s selection committee, Sellers junior was just 25 when he led the team on his first-class debut against Oxford University in the opening match of 1932. Nepotism may have played a part in his rise through the ranks but providence helped to bring him the captaincy; although Sellers took charge at Oxford, the official club captain was Frank Greenwood, a useful batsman who’d led Yorkshire to the title in 1931. However, Greenwood played just seven times in 1932 after his father’s death, which forced him to prioritise business interests, and it fell on Sellers to step into the breach in the days when amateurs captained the club.
Tall and thickset, with a no-nonsense bearing, Sellers was blessed with the appearance of authority. He looked more like a centre-half than a cricketer, the sort who’d quickly upend an opponent to lay down a marker for the rest of the match. A strict disciplinarian, Sellers won respect not so much through batting ability but approach to the game and attitude to colleagues. He put the team’s interests first and led from the front. Yet for all his captaincy skill, the side under his control was so talented it could probably have run itself. Yorkshire’s first-choice XI – the one that played in the 10 for 10 game – was awash with class and colourful characters.
Yorkshire in 1932. Back row (l–r): Billy Ringrose (scorer), Hedley Verity, Frank Dennis, Bill Bowes, Arthur Rhodes, Arthur Mitchell, Bright Heyhirst (masseur). Front row (l–r): Wilf Barber, George Macaulay, Percy Holmes, Brian Sellers (captain), Herbert Sutcliffe, Maurice Leyland, Arthur Wood. (Yorkshire CCC)
Sutcliffe spearheaded the batting and was a national hero; in Australia in 1924–25, he’d set a new record for most runs in a Test series (734) and played a key role
in the Ashes wins of 1926 and 1929. A self-made batsman, with prodigious concentration, Sutcliffe possessed a heavenly hook and clinical cover drive. The epitome of sartorial elegance, he wore spotless silk shirts, Savile Row suits and scrupulously parted, shiny black hair. R. C. Robertson-Glasgow said Sutcliffe was “the sort of man who would rather miss a train than run for it, and so be seen in disorder and heard breathing heavily”. Neville Cardus called him “the pin-up boy in the bedrooms of countless Yorkshire girls” and said he appeared into a dour Yorkshire team as “some Lothario might have appeared among Cromwell’s Ironsides”.
Holmes, eight years Sutcliffe’s senior at 45, made his first-class debut before the war and was the oldest player in the Headingley match. The average age of both the Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire sides was 30, and in those days a cricketer’s lifespan was longer; Wilfred Rhodes had played his last Test two years earlier, aged 52, while Jack Hobbs was still going strong in his 50th year – and scored more than half his first-class hundreds after the age of 40. Dainty and dexterous, with a full range of shots, Holmes had a sprightly demeanour and Stan Laurel grin. Cardus likened him to a “stable-boy” and said he “seemed to brush an innings, comb it, making the appropriate whistling sounds”. The third great pillar of the Yorkshire batting was Maurice Leyland, a popular 31-year-old left-hander who’d been an England regular since 1928. Broad-beamed and terrier-like, Leyland could cream the cover off the ball or play a backs-to-the-wall innings of Sutcliffian concentration. Completing the top-order were Wilf “Tiddly” Barber and Arthur “Ticker” Mitchell, emerg ing players of contrasting stature. Barber, 31, was small, slim and technically solid, while Mitchell, 29, was tall, tenacious and physically terrifying; his menacing features, set in steel, would not have looked out of place in the East End ganglands governed by the Krays.