by Chris Waters
Carr defended stoically for 15 minutes against Macaulay and Verity before perishing to his first attacking shot; he connected cleanly with an attempted straight six off Verity but was brilliantly caught by Wilf Barber, who ran 20 yards from wide long-on to snatch the ball in front of the sightscreen. Carr’s dismissal for a duck to the final ball of Verity’s fifth over left Nottinghamshire 40 for three and in need of a sizeable score from Arthur Staples, whose recent form had led to calls for his consideration for the tour to Australia. Staples got off the mark first ball with a three to square-leg off Macaulay but became hopelessly bogged down and had not added to his tally when, 20 minutes later, Macaulay knocked back his middle stump with another quicker delivery as the visitors slumped to 46 for four. Nottinghamshire lurched into lunch on 61 for four (Walker 34, Charlie Harris 2, Verity 1 for 14 from 13 overs), their struggles in perfect conditions highlighted by the fact they did not hit a boundary during the session.
A crowd that had mushroomed during the morning could only hope for better after the break, when 16,000 would fill the ground to give Yorkshire their largest gate of the season. Not only was the meeting between the Championship’s second and third-placed teams an attractive draw, but county cricket in the 1930s was much more popular than it is today; Yorkshire’s average daily attendance during the decade was around 8,000, while the club often pulled gates of 15,000-plus for important matches. With Test cricket holding scarcity value, and with no television to tempt away spectators, the Championship held considerable significance, with the players themselves widely esteemed. To put that 16,000 figure into context, it was only a few hundred less than watched the opening day of the last Headingley Ashes Test in 2009. In the 1930s, people flocked to the ground on trams and trains, buses and bicycles, or simply walked from miles around. Enthusiasm for the game flew in the face of the economic climate, with the Great Depression – triggered by the Wall Street crash of 1929 – causing hardship for many working-class families. In northern cities such as Leeds, unemployed men hung around on street corners, among them those who’d returned from the First World War with broken bodies and broken spirits, while women struggled on war widow’s pensions, many relying on soup kitchens for food and hand-me-down clothes for their children. In Leeds, unemployment in June 1932 alone rose by 2,004 to 27,092, while 60 miles north in Stockton-on-Tees, a staggering 70 per cent of the workforce was jobless. Cricket was a means of escape at a time of fewer competing entertainments; it was also comparatively affordable. Admission to the Yorkshire-Nottinghamshire match ranged from 1s 6d for adults (around £2.50 today) to 2s 4d (around £4 today), with concessions for children and OAPs. Of the 16,000 who saw the first day, 9,656 paid, earning Yorkshire £552 (about £18,500 today). The rest were members who normally watched from the Rugby Stand but, due to the building work, were temporarily moved to the 2s 4d seats. This deprived non-members of the chance to sit in those better seats – an unavoidable inconvenience that cut no ice with someone called “Londoner”, who complained to the Yorkshire Evening Post.
The only other known action photograph from the 10 for 10 fixture as Arthur Staples is bowled by George Macaulay in the Nottinghamshire first innings.
Sir,
Some thousands of cricket enthusiasts visited the ground for the Notts match with the intention of occupying the 2s 4d seats. Upon arriving at the gate, they found that those seats had been reserved for the use of members only, owing to the new stand being erected on the space usually occupied by members.
The consequence was that only the 1s 6d portion was available for people who would willingly have paid 2s 4d, or even more. There was no notice in the newspapers to that effect, nor posters near the gates.
It is pleasing to note that the new stand is progressing and no doubt before next season the pavilion will receive a coat of paint. At present it is the unanimous opinion that the shabbiest county cricket ground is at Headingley.
Despite “Londoner’s” criticisms, the Leeds venue was arguably more attractive than it is today, and certainly more arboreal and expansive. Although the building work marred it in 1932, the ground had a knot of elm trees at the Kirkstall Lane end, which is nowadays served by the Carnegie Pavilion, and a bowling green behind the exposed area presently occupied by the sprawling East Stand. The old pavilion, with its dark-brown brickwork and gleaming white railings, was the only proper stand as such and possessed two towers at each end – one of which housed the press, the other the scorers (in this case, the Yorkshire scorer Billy Ringrose and his Nottinghamshire counterpart Jack Carlin). The concrete cycle track, which in those days enabled freedom of movement all round the ground, added to a feeling of space largely shattered by contemporary structures. Photographs of the period show Headingley to be, if not quite a good-looking ground, then at least one tastefully arranged and with less of a slapdash feel than it has now – as if, in the words of former Yorkshire Post cricket correspondent Rob Mills, “it has been put together by a hyperactive seven-year-old with a few Lego bricks left over”. Those photographs show crowds immaculately ordered in lines and rows, with barely a Homburg out of place, and in subdued rather than showy fashions. In those austere times, sombre hues were de rigueur and sunnier colours in short supply. Schoolboys watched in dark colours too, the luckier ones forming a guard of honour to clap the players on and off the field.
In an arrangement between Yorkshire and the building contractor, the Leeds-based William Airey and Sons, work on the Rugby Stand stopped when the bowling was from that end and continued when the action resumed from the Kirkstall Lane side. It was in front of the cement mixers and clutter, the wooden planks and workmen, that Nottinghamshire lost their fifth wicket on 67 just after lunch. Bowes, recalled to the attack with Rhodes, banged in a bouncer at Walker, who top-edged a hook to Barber on the long-leg boundary next to the rubble. Walker had added only two to his lunchtime score but, according to the Yorkshire Evening Post, had “served his side faithfully in trying circumstances”. It should have been 67 for six but Bowes missed George Vernon Gunn in the same over before he’d scored. The ball was short and Gunn, shaping to pull, spliced in the air, Bowes falling over as he charged down the wicket to try to take the catch. Ivan Sharpe, of the Sunday Chronicle, was particularly critical of Bowes’s blunder, insisting it proved England could not afford to take both him and Frank Woolley, the veteran Kent batsman, to Australia that winter – at least not to play in the same side. “D. R. Jardine would have a prize problem in setting his field if he had to hide both Woolley and Bowes,” stated Sharpe. In the end, Bowes would make the trip but Woolley would not. Bowes’s fielding was as ridiculed as his bowling was revered. For Yorkshire, he stood at mid-on and barely moved a muscle. On Sellers’s orders, it was understood that to save Bowes’s legs, and most probably his blushes, it was somebody else’s job to chase the ball and throw it in. Bowes was only expected to stop or catch it if it went straight at him. Similarly, if Bowes, the archetypal No. 11, lingered at the crease and wasted time, it was his partner’s duty to run him out, which partly explained why he took more first-class wickets (1,639) than he scored runs (1,531).
Bowes was in the side to take wickets and he’d helped put Yorkshire into a commanding position against their title rivals. However, as cloud gave way to afternoon sunshine, and as the temperature climbed to 82 degrees, his botched attempt to catch Gunn sparked a momentum shift as the innings underwent slow reconstruction. Twenty minutes into the session, Harris finally recorded the first boundary of the match, glancing Bowes just wide of Barber at long leg, the Nottingham Guardian remarking that “the spectators were almost too surprised to cheer”. But Nottinghamshire sought to recover through defensive means, a tactic that angered the belligerent Bowes, who tried to upset the batsmen with bouncers. Just over one month later, Bowes would employ the same strategy against Surrey’s Jack Hobbs at The Oval, in the process attracting fierce criticism from former Middlesex batsman “Plum” Warner, whose contention in the Morning Post that it was “not cr
icket” would be thrown back at him after he returned from co-managing the Bodyline tour. Tensions between Bowes and Hobbs – paradoxically two of cricket’s nicest men – would boil over when Hobbs walked down the pitch after one bouncer to pat a spot near the bowler’s stumps. Egged on by George Macaulay, Bowes would respond with an even shorter delivery, Hobbs this time reacting by walking past the stumps altogether and patting down a spot in the bowler’s run-up. Later, Macaulay would fling two beamers at Surrey captain Douglas Jardine, who’d duck them disdainfully.
Bowes’s bouncers at Leeds were primarily designed to hurry up Harris, one of cricket’s most exasperating players. Like George Gunn senior, Harris was renowned for blocking bad balls and belting blameless deliveries to the boundary; like Gunn senior too, his batting reflected his quirky personality. Stories of Harris’s foibles abound; one of his favourite whims was to provide a running commentary of his innings as he imagined it might appear in the papers. “Harris was in a very dour mood today,” he might say, “and certainly not at his best.” Naturally funny, which belied a somewhat challenging facial appearance, Harris once emerged from the pavilion in bad light carrying a candle and walked to the scoreboard instead of the wicket; sometimes he took out his false teeth and laid them on the ground while fielding. Best of all, story goes that he once ended up in hospital after dislocating his shoulder and was moaning and groaning as they tried to put it back. Eventually, the nurse lost patience: “Look, there’s a woman downstairs who’s just had twins and she’s making far less noise than you.” “Ah yes,” said Harris, “but are they trying to put them back?”
Gunn was a more conventional character and the least celebrated of the family dynasty. As well as having a father Wisden called “one of the cricketing marvels of the age”, George Vernon’s uncle was John Gunn, the only Nottinghamshire player to score more than 20,000 runs and take over 1,000 wickets, while his great uncle was Billy Gunn, who enjoyed prodigious partnerships with Arthur Shrewsbury in the 19th century. Gunn junior was not in the same talent bracket but was still a useful county pro; the previous year, he’d scored his maiden century against Warwickshire at Edgbaston, George Gunn senior also hitting a hundred in the only instance of a father and son making a three-figure score in the same Championship innings. After a sticky patch in 1932, Gunn junior had returned to form with 86 in the win against Worcestershire two days earlier, and now he capitalised on Bowes’s failure to catch him at Leeds by helping Harris draw the sting from the attack and, as a consequence, the fun from the day. Both men carried caution to the nth degree against Verity, who again followed Rhodes at the Rugby Stand end. There was no spin or bounce in the pitch but Verity was patient and persevering and a combination of his accuracy and Nottinghamshire’s apathy resulted in a sober stalemate for the crowd. Only once did Gunn throw caution to the wind, swatting Verity over long-on towards the pavilion to register the second four of the innings after three hours’ play. Otherwise, spectators tired of the respect the batsmen showed to Verity and ironically applauded Harris when he pushed out a straight dead bat to ball after ball.
Keen to fashion a much-needed breakthrough, Sellers turned to Maurice Leyland, a part-time left-arm spinner who replaced Verity at 120 for five after Verity’s second spell of 11 overs for 12 runs. It was a masterstroke, Leyland striking with his fifth ball to have Harris lbw for 35, ending a stand of 53. It was not Leyland who appealed but wicketkeeper Wood, who then missed a simple stumping when Leyland was immediately withdrawn and replaced again by Verity. Gunn, on 26, was lured out of his ground only for Wood to make what the Sunday Chronicle termed “a Saturday afternoon mess of the chance”. Verity’s reaction was typically restrained; he never got mad if a chance went begging. “If you dropped a catch off him he just smiled,” remembered the former Yorkshire and England batsman Len Hutton. “I never saw him angry or even agitated at a turn of events in a game. He had a remarkable temperament.” Moments before tea, Macaulay dropped Ben Lilley off his own bowling, Nottinghamshire dining on 148 for six (Gunn 26, Lilley 19).
Verity got Gunn soon after the break, bowling him for 31 to leave the visitors 159 for seven. It heralded the only hitting of the day as Harold Larwood joined Lilley. Larwood was hardly the worst No. 9; he had three first-class hundreds to his name, the highest an innings of 102 not out against Sussex at Trent Bridge the previous year. In the lull of late afternoon, Larwood immediately set about the bowling – but not before he’d set about his partner. Larwood’s first aggressive shot was a searing straight drive off Rhodes that sent Lilley’s bat flying out of his hands as he desperately took evasive action, the sort of grim spectacle Larwood normally produced with the ball. The fast bowler followed up by straight-driving Rhodes for four – this time missing the ducking Lilley – and launching Verity for a straight six into the excavations for the new stand, the ball ricocheting among the wooden planks and causing a stoppage while it was retrieved. Once again, Verity was unmoved. As Bowes wrote, “If you saw nothing but his poker face it would be impossible to tell whether his ball had been knocked for six or had spreadeagled the stumps.”
Not many knocked Verity’s ball for six … Frank Woolley once did so four times during an incredible innings of 188 out of 296 for four at Bradford, bringing Verity back down to earth a fortnight after his 10 for 36. Hugh Bartlett, the Sussex batsman, smashed him for six sixes in two overs on his way to 94 during a game at Headingley in 1938. However, considering that slow bowlers are liable to such punishment, Verity was rarely taken apart. The most famous assault on him came at Sheffield in 1935, when the South African wicketkeeper Jock Cameron thumped him for 30 in one over – three fours followed by three sixes as Verity deliberately tossed the ball up. It sparked one of cricket’s most celebrated quips. As Cameron peppered the Bramall Lane boundary, Arthur Wood called out, “Go on, Hedley, you have him in two minds. He doesn’t know whether to hit you for four or six.”
As Larwood made a mockery of earlier tardiness, Nottinghamshire’s total raced to 200. In those days, a fielding team were entitled to a new ball after 200 runs had been scored, and having bowled unchanged since tea with limited success, Verity now experimented with four overs of medium-paced swingers to four short-legs, reprising his days in Lancashire League cricket. The tactic stifled Larwood but did not shift him, and after Verity’s third and final spell brought one for 38 from 17 overs, Sellers again summoned up Leyland. As he’d shown by dismissing Harris before tea, Leyland was a handy partnership-breaker, who’d be good enough to take 466 first-class wickets at 29.31. J. M. Kilburn, who joined the Yorkshire Post as cricket correspondent two years after the 10 for 10 game, said, “Leyland’s bowling is mostly a joke, but it is an extremely practical joke”, even if the impression is of “seaside holiday bowling where a spade is the bat and the wicket a stanchion of the pier”. Leyland made no claim for his second string but did insist he invented the term “Chinaman”, the slow left-armer’s ball that spins from off to leg. The derivation is mostly attributed to an incident during the Old Trafford Test of 1933 between England and West Indies. When England batsman Walter Robins was stumped off left-arm spinner Ellis “Puss” Achong, a Trinidadian of Chinese ancestry, he is said to have walked off grumbling, “Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman.” Learie Constantine, fielding nearby, purportedly enquired, “Do you mean the bowler or the ball?” However, Leyland was adamant that he coined the term, a claim backed up by the fact that in the 1920s Yorkshire’s Roy Kilner would often urge his captain, if a wicket was overdue, “Put Maurice on to bowl some of those Chinese things.” Kilner, who’d been expected to take Wilfred Rhodes’s place as left-arm spinner but for his death from enteric fever in 1928, would add, “It’s foreign stuff – and you can’t call it anything else.”
Whatever it was, and whoever coined it, Leyland’s wiles were too much for Nottinghamshire, who subsided swiftly in the evening shadows. At 233, Larwood lashed out and was bowled for 48, ending what the Leeds Mercury called “a capital little innings full of clean,
crisp driving” and a stand of 74 with Lilley. Leyland wrapped up the innings by bowling Bill Voce and Sam Staples for ducks to finish with four for 14 from 8.2 overs, the last three wickets for no runs in eight balls. Nottinghamshire were all out at 6.20 for 234 (Lilley 46 not out) and there was no time to start the Yorkshire reply. Leyland, who’d been heavily quoted in the newspapers that day after the death of former Warwickshire and England fast bowler Harry Howell, whose 10 for 51 against Yorkshire at Edgbaston in 1923 he’d called “the best piece of bowling I have seen”, and which is still the only 10-fer against Yorkshire in the Championship, was now heavily praised. The Yorkshire Post said: “The success of the extraordinarily mixed material he used to confound the Notts batsmen was, perhaps, the outstanding feature on a day when the bat, contrary to expectations, was always struggling against the ball.” Verity, whom one writer said “was never the equal of Leyland”, finished with two for 64 from 41 overs. Nottinghamshire faced 132.2 overs for a dilatory run-rate of 1.7.
Elsewhere, slow scoring was also a feature at the Bath Festival, where fourth-bottom Glamorgan crawled to 110 in 86 overs before seventh-bottom Somerset replied with 141 for three. Ditto in the mid-table meeting at Southampton, where Hampshire made 120 in 87.4 overs against Middlesex, who reached 95 for two. In contrast, runs flowed at Old Trafford, where Lancashire were 442 for five against the Indian tourists (Ernest Tyldesley 196); at Chesterfield, where lower mid-table Derbyshire were 393 for five against lowly Essex (Garnet Lee 101 not out), and at Blackheath, where Freddie Brown struck 168 of mid-table Surrey’s 345 against leaders Kent, who reached 78 for one. Otherwise, wickets tumbled steadily: 20 at Northampton, where the third-bottom home team scored 105 in reply to bottom club Gloucestershire’s 228; 17 at Kidderminster, where fifth-placed Sussex were 158 for seven after dismissing second-bottom Worcestershire for 192, and 14 at Coventry, where mid-table Leicestershire were 87 for four in reply to struggling Warwickshire’s 222.