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Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
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The Name Game.
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Erapalli Prasanna
Dr WG (William Gilbert) Grace (Iconic Cricketing legend of Early 20th Century)
This from the cricinfo Player page -
Wisden Appreciation
On July 18, it will be 150 years since WG Grace was born, but there are other ways of measuring how distant he is in time. For one thing, no one still alive, not even Jim Swanton, can remember seeing him play (although in Sort of a cricket Person, E.W.S. notes that "I am supposed to have watched [him] from my perambulator on the Forest Hill ground round 1910"). Eight decades have passed since Grace died, yet he dogs us still, demanding our attention at regular intervals.
The statistics of his career are alone enough to explain why – more than 54,000 first-class runs (there are at least two different versions of the precise figure, so let’s leave it at that) spread across 44 seasons, including 839 in just eight days of 1876, when he hit a couple of triple-centuries, and only one other batsman managed to top a thousand runs in the entire season; a thousand in May in 1895, when he was nearly 47; and 2,800-odd wickets costing less than 18 runs apiece. I suppose we might wonder why his bowling average wasn’t even more impressive, given the ropey pitches on which Dr Grace played. No modern cricketer would deign to turn out on them, which makes his batting all the more wondrous, and comparisons with Bradman or anyone since quite pointless.
But there was not that much to Grace apart from these skills and his devotion to his family. A hand of whist appears to have marked the limit of his capacity for cerebration, and if one wished to be rude to suburbia one might identify Grace as suburban man incarnate, fluctuating mentally as well as physically between the fringes of Bristol and the London Counties, ultimately coming to rest in Eltham. His one inherited asset was that he came from a clan which was dotty about a great game and dutiful (but in some cases no more) about the general practice of medicine, with no doubt in its collective mind which came first at all times and in all places. His brother EM Grace, who was a coroner, once had a corpse put on ice until he could attend to it at close of play, and WG himself must have had one of the most prolonged medical trainings in history because he so frequently interrupted it in order to exercise his major talent at the crease. He began to study as a bachelor of 19, and was a father of three in his thirties before taking his final qualification at Westminster Hospital. His most conspicuous act as a doctor is thought to have occurred when an unfortunate fieldsman impaled himself on the boundary fence at Old Trafford.
It was simply because the cricketing Grace totally dominated his own era that an exasperated CLR James could not understand why standard history books of the period never mentioned him. This man, for heaven’s sake, opened for England at the age of 50 – and at the age of 18 he had scored 224 not out for England against Surrey, in a match which he left halfway through in order to win a quarter-mile hurdles championship at the Crystal Palace! No wonder he was the best-known Englishman apart from Mr Gladstone, so much so that Evelyn Waugh’s friend, Monsignor Ronnie Knox, waggishly suggested that Gladstone and Grace were really one and the same celebrity.
Athletic is not a word that obviously comes to mind when contemplating Grace in his prime, though a slim young man did precede the pot-bellied genius who in middle age was far too heavy for any horse to bear. I have often wondered how stylishly he played his strokes, ever since I saw some film in which he appeared to be brandishing his bat as though he was about to poke the fire with it. Something tells me that he never hit the ball as gracefully as Victor Trumper did in the famous photo of his straight drive; Grace, I suspect, was much more about power than aesthetics.
That, at any rate, would fit what we know of his character in general. Apart from tenderness to his relatives and a generous soft spot for children, he was not, I think, a particularly attractive man, though he could sometimes (and it is usually recorded as remarkable) encourage a young player on his own side with – as the saying went in his day – bluff good humour. After the Australians had experienced him for the first time, a commentator Down Under observed that, "For so big a man, he is surprisingly tenacious on very small points." He was notorious for employing, in order to pursue victory or personal achievement, a variety of wiles and tricks that may be thought of as, well, hardly cricket. He was also, throughout his career, quite breathtakingly grasping when his eye caught the glint of hard cash.
It was the social historian Eric Midwinter who, some years ago, pointed out that on Grace’s first tour of Australia in 1873–74 (when he was a medical student simultaneously enjoying his honeymoon) he extracted a fee of £1,500 from the organisers, which would be well over £100,000 at present values. On his second tour in 1891–92, one-fifth of the entire cost of transporting 13 English cricketers across the world, supporting them in Australia and paying them for what they did there, went into Grace’s pocket. He regularly collected testimonials – one, worth £1,458, was organised by MCC so that he might buy a medical practice – and overall probably took something like £1 million in today’s currency out of the game; and, remember, there was no sponsorship nor endorsements in those days to inflate a star’s income. This was in a period when the prosperous middle classes were earning no more than £1,000 a year, a highly skilled artisan £200, and a labourer half as much if he was lucky. A good professional county cricketer in the second half of the 19th century saw his wages rise from £100 to £250. No wonder it cost twice as much to get into some English grounds if Grace was playing than if he was not.
The astonishing thing about the mercenary Grace, of course, is that he was classified and has ever since been glorified as an amateur. Nothing more exposed the humbug that used to smother the entire topic of Gents v Players than an examination of Grace’s financial rewards from the game; and nothing more reveals the intellectual dishonesty at the heart of the humbug than something Grace once said when trying to argue the Gloucestershire committee into playing more amateurs than professionals.
He declared his fear for the future of cricket if it became wholly professional. "Betting and all kindred evils will follow in its wake, and instead of the game being followed up for love, it will simply be a matter of £ s d." Prophetic words, perhaps; but it ill became WG Grace to mouth them.
It will be gathered from the above that he has never been a hero of mine, not since the day in adolescence when I discovered that he was sometimes a shameless cheat in a game that, I was being asked to believe, was wholly honourable. I shall nevertheless drink to his memory on July 18 because his tremendous gifts, especially his phenomenal batting, were largely responsible for the elevation of cricket from just another 19th-century game, which had become popular partly because it lent itself to gambling.
Grace’s towering presence, more than any other single factor, transformed it into the unrivalled spectator sport of summer, first of all in England, subsequently in other lands spread widely across the world. I would even suggest that a true measurement of WG’s unique stature is that he is instantly identifiable, even by some who are uninterested in his vocation, by his initials alone. I cannot think of another human being in any sphere, not even W.C. Fields, of whom this is also true. Geoffrey Moorhouse, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1998
This from the cricinfo Player page -
Wisden Appreciation
On July 18, it will be 150 years since WG Grace was born, but there are other ways of measuring how distant he is in time. For one thing, no one still alive, not even Jim Swanton, can remember seeing him play (although in Sort of a cricket Person, E.W.S. notes that "I am supposed to have watched [him] from my perambulator on the Forest Hill ground round 1910"). Eight decades have passed since Grace died, yet he dogs us still, demanding our attention at regular intervals.
The statistics of his career are alone enough to explain why – more than 54,000 first-class runs (there are at least two different versions of the precise figure, so let’s leave it at that) spread across 44 seasons, including 839 in just eight days of 1876, when he hit a couple of triple-centuries, and only one other batsman managed to top a thousand runs in the entire season; a thousand in May in 1895, when he was nearly 47; and 2,800-odd wickets costing less than 18 runs apiece. I suppose we might wonder why his bowling average wasn’t even more impressive, given the ropey pitches on which Dr Grace played. No modern cricketer would deign to turn out on them, which makes his batting all the more wondrous, and comparisons with Bradman or anyone since quite pointless.
But there was not that much to Grace apart from these skills and his devotion to his family. A hand of whist appears to have marked the limit of his capacity for cerebration, and if one wished to be rude to suburbia one might identify Grace as suburban man incarnate, fluctuating mentally as well as physically between the fringes of Bristol and the London Counties, ultimately coming to rest in Eltham. His one inherited asset was that he came from a clan which was dotty about a great game and dutiful (but in some cases no more) about the general practice of medicine, with no doubt in its collective mind which came first at all times and in all places. His brother EM Grace, who was a coroner, once had a corpse put on ice until he could attend to it at close of play, and WG himself must have had one of the most prolonged medical trainings in history because he so frequently interrupted it in order to exercise his major talent at the crease. He began to study as a bachelor of 19, and was a father of three in his thirties before taking his final qualification at Westminster Hospital. His most conspicuous act as a doctor is thought to have occurred when an unfortunate fieldsman impaled himself on the boundary fence at Old Trafford.
It was simply because the cricketing Grace totally dominated his own era that an exasperated CLR James could not understand why standard history books of the period never mentioned him. This man, for heaven’s sake, opened for England at the age of 50 – and at the age of 18 he had scored 224 not out for England against Surrey, in a match which he left halfway through in order to win a quarter-mile hurdles championship at the Crystal Palace! No wonder he was the best-known Englishman apart from Mr Gladstone, so much so that Evelyn Waugh’s friend, Monsignor Ronnie Knox, waggishly suggested that Gladstone and Grace were really one and the same celebrity.
Athletic is not a word that obviously comes to mind when contemplating Grace in his prime, though a slim young man did precede the pot-bellied genius who in middle age was far too heavy for any horse to bear. I have often wondered how stylishly he played his strokes, ever since I saw some film in which he appeared to be brandishing his bat as though he was about to poke the fire with it. Something tells me that he never hit the ball as gracefully as Victor Trumper did in the famous photo of his straight drive; Grace, I suspect, was much more about power than aesthetics.
That, at any rate, would fit what we know of his character in general. Apart from tenderness to his relatives and a generous soft spot for children, he was not, I think, a particularly attractive man, though he could sometimes (and it is usually recorded as remarkable) encourage a young player on his own side with – as the saying went in his day – bluff good humour. After the Australians had experienced him for the first time, a commentator Down Under observed that, "For so big a man, he is surprisingly tenacious on very small points." He was notorious for employing, in order to pursue victory or personal achievement, a variety of wiles and tricks that may be thought of as, well, hardly cricket. He was also, throughout his career, quite breathtakingly grasping when his eye caught the glint of hard cash.
It was the social historian Eric Midwinter who, some years ago, pointed out that on Grace’s first tour of Australia in 1873–74 (when he was a medical student simultaneously enjoying his honeymoon) he extracted a fee of £1,500 from the organisers, which would be well over £100,000 at present values. On his second tour in 1891–92, one-fifth of the entire cost of transporting 13 English cricketers across the world, supporting them in Australia and paying them for what they did there, went into Grace’s pocket. He regularly collected testimonials – one, worth £1,458, was organised by MCC so that he might buy a medical practice – and overall probably took something like £1 million in today’s currency out of the game; and, remember, there was no sponsorship nor endorsements in those days to inflate a star’s income. This was in a period when the prosperous middle classes were earning no more than £1,000 a year, a highly skilled artisan £200, and a labourer half as much if he was lucky. A good professional county cricketer in the second half of the 19th century saw his wages rise from £100 to £250. No wonder it cost twice as much to get into some English grounds if Grace was playing than if he was not.
The astonishing thing about the mercenary Grace, of course, is that he was classified and has ever since been glorified as an amateur. Nothing more exposed the humbug that used to smother the entire topic of Gents v Players than an examination of Grace’s financial rewards from the game; and nothing more reveals the intellectual dishonesty at the heart of the humbug than something Grace once said when trying to argue the Gloucestershire committee into playing more amateurs than professionals.
He declared his fear for the future of cricket if it became wholly professional. "Betting and all kindred evils will follow in its wake, and instead of the game being followed up for love, it will simply be a matter of £ s d." Prophetic words, perhaps; but it ill became WG Grace to mouth them.
It will be gathered from the above that he has never been a hero of mine, not since the day in adolescence when I discovered that he was sometimes a shameless cheat in a game that, I was being asked to believe, was wholly honourable. I shall nevertheless drink to his memory on July 18 because his tremendous gifts, especially his phenomenal batting, were largely responsible for the elevation of cricket from just another 19th-century game, which had become popular partly because it lent itself to gambling.
Grace’s towering presence, more than any other single factor, transformed it into the unrivalled spectator sport of summer, first of all in England, subsequently in other lands spread widely across the world. I would even suggest that a true measurement of WG’s unique stature is that he is instantly identifiable, even by some who are uninterested in his vocation, by his initials alone. I cannot think of another human being in any sphere, not even W.C. Fields, of whom this is also true. Geoffrey Moorhouse, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack 1998
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Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
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Hedley Verity (England 1931-39) Died POW in Italy
This from the Cricinfo player page -
Wisden obituary
Hedley Verity, Captain, The Green Howards, died of wounds a prisoner of war in Italy on July 31, 1943, some two months after his thirty-eighth birthday. He had been reported wounded and missing, and the news of his death came on September 1, exactly four years after he had played his last match for Yorkshire and, at Hove, taken seven Sussex wickets for nine runs in one innings, which finished county cricket before the war.
He received his wounds in the Eighth Army’s first attack on the German positions at Catania, in Sicily. Eye-witnesses, who were a few yards from Verity when he was hit, have told the story. The objective was a ridge with strong points and pillboxes. Behind a creeping barrage Verity led his company forward 700 yards. When the barrage ceased, they went on another 300 yards and neared the ridge, in darkness. As the men advanced, through corn two feet high, tracer-bullets swept into them. Then they wriggled through the corn, Verity encouraging them with “Keep going, keep going.” The moon was at their back, and the enemy used mortar-fire, Very lights and fire-bombs, setting the corn alight. The strongest point appeared to be a farm-house, to the left of the ridge; so Verity sent one platoon round to take the farm-house, while the other gave covering fire. The enemy fire increased, and, as they crept forward, Verity was hit in the chest. “Keep going,” he said, “and get them out of that farm-house.” When it was decided to withdraw, they last saw Verity lying on the ground, in front of the burning corn, his head supported by his batman. So, in the last grim game, Verity showed, as he was so sure to do, that rare courage which both calculates and inspires.
Judged by any standard, Verity was a great bowler. Merely to watch him was to know that. The balance of the run up, the high ease of the left-handed action, the scrupulous length, the pensive variety, all proclaimed the master. He combined nature with art to a degree not equalled by any other English bowler of our time. He received a handsome legacy of skill and, by an application that verged on scientific research, turned it into a fortune. There have been bowlers who have reached greatness without knowing, or, perhaps, caring to know just how or why; but Verity could analyse his own intentions without losing the joy of surprise and describe their effect without losing the company of a listener. He was the ever-learning professor, justly proud yet utterly humble.
In the matter of plain arithmetic, so often torn from its context to the confusion of judgement, Verity, by taking 1,956 wickets at 14.87 runs each in ten years of first-class cricket, showed by far the best average of his time. In the recorded history of cricket the only bowlers of this class with lower averages are: Alfred Shaw, 2,072 wickets at 11.97 each; Tom Emmett, 1,595 wickets at 13.43 each; George Lohmann, 1,841 wickets at 13.73 each; James Southerton, 1,744 wickets at 14.30 each. It might be argued that during the period 1854 to 1898, covered by the careers of these cricketers, pitches tended to give more help to the bowler than they did during Verity’s time. Verity, I know, for one, would not have pressed such a claim in his own favour. He never dwelt on decimals; and, while he enjoyed personal triumph as much as the next man, that which absorbed his deepest interest was the proper issue of a Test match with Australia or of an up-and-down bout with Lancashire; and if, in his country’s or county’s struggle towards victory, he brought off some recondite plot for the confounding, of Bradman or McCabe or Ernest Tyldesley or Edward Paynter, well, then he was happy beyond computing.
Yet his bowling achievements, pressed into but overflowing the ten years of his career, were so rich and various that they here demand some concentrated notice.
He played in 40 Test matches, taking 144 wickets at 24.37 runs each. He took 100 wickets in Test cricket in a shorter period than any other English bowler.
He is the only cricketer who has taken 14 wickets in a day in a Test match, this feat being performed against Australia at Lord’s in the second Test, 1934. During this match, he took 15 wickets for 104 runs, thus sharing with Wilfred Rhodes, his Yorkshire predecessor, the honour of taking most wickets in an England v. Australia match.
Twice he took all 10 wickets in an innings; in 1931, against Warwickshire at Headingley, Leeds, for 36 runs in 18.4 (6-ball) overs, 6 maidens; in 1932, on the same ground, against Nottinghamshire, for 10 runs in 19.4 (6-ball) overs, 16 maidens – a world record in first-class cricket for the fewest number of runs conceded by a bowler taking all 10 wickets in an innings, and it included the hat-trick.
Against Essex at Leyton, in 1933, he took 17 wickets in one day, a record shared only by C. Blythe and T.W. Goddard.
In each of his nine full English seasons he took at least 150 wickets, and he averaged 185 wickets a season; thrice consecutively (1935-36-37) he took over 200 wickets. His average ranged from 12.42 to 17.63. He headed the first-class English bowling averages in his first season (1930) and in his last (1939), and never came out lower than fifth.
Verity was born at Headingley, but passed his twenty-fifth birthday before he played for Yorkshire, in 1930, the year that W. Rhodes retired. Some of his earlier seasons were spent in playing as an amateur for Rawdon in the Yorkshire Council; for Accrington in the Lancashire League; and for Middleton in the Central League. He was then, as always afterwards when allowed, an all-rounder. As a batsman, his height, reach, concentration and knowledge of what to avoid raised him distinctly from the ruck of mediocrity; but, whereas his bowling included grace, his batting had only style. The former was nature embellished by art; the latter was art improved by invention.
As a bowler, Hedley Verity stands, and will stand, with his illustrious predecessors in the Yorkshire attack: Edmund Peate (1879-1887), Robert Peel (1882-1899), Wilfred Rhodes (1898-1930) – the dates indicate the time of their respective playing careers – but Verity was not a slow left-hander in the accepted sense, and he used to reject comparision with Rhodes so far as method was concerned, saying: “both of us are left-handed and like taking wickets; let’s leave it at that.”
Verity’s mean pace was what is called slow-medium; on fast pitches, often about medium; and he would send down an inswinging yorker of an abrupt virulence not unworthy of George Hirst.
Naturally, on wet or crumbled or sticky pitches, he reduced pace and tossed the leg-spinner higher, but even here his variety of pace and of angle of delivery was remarkable. He was a born schemer; tireless, but never wild, in experiment; as sensitive in observation as a good host, or as an instrumentalist who spots a rival on the beat; the scholar who does not only dream, the inventor who can make it work.
Just how good a bowler was he? In relation to rivals in his own craft but of an earlier day, such a question is useless except to amuse an idle hour or to excite and idle quarrel. We can only say that, in his own short time, he was the best of his kind. In England, day in and day out, he may never have quite touched the greatness of Robert Peel, Colin Blythe or Wilfred Rhodes. In Australia, neither in 1932-33 or 1936-37, did he perplex their batsmen quite as J.C. White perplexed them in 1928-29, but, as a workman-artist, he will take some beating. H.B. Cameron, that fine wicket-keeper-batsman of South Africa, playing against Yorkshire in 1935, hit him for three fours and three sixes in one over; but very rarely did a batsman survive a liberty taken with Verity. He had, besides, a wonderful skill in restoring the “rabbits”, early and with little inconvenience, to the hutch.
If a touchstone of Verity’s greatness be needed, there is D.G. Bradman, the most inexorable scorer of runs that cricket has yet seen, whose Test match average against England stands at 91.42 in 46 innings. I think it was Verity who kept that average under 150. He was one of only three or four bowlers who came to the battle with Bradman on not unequal terms (haud impar congressus!); and Bradman was reported as saying: “I think I know all about Clarrie (Grimmett), but with Hedley I am never sure. You see, there’s no breaking point with him.”
Verity timed his blows. In the fifth Test match, at Sydney, early in 1933, Australia, 19 runs behind on the first innings, lost Victor Richardson for 0. Woodfull and Bradman added 115; Larwood, injured, had left the field – and that particular Larwood never came back – then Verity deceived Bradman in flight, bowled him for 71 and went on to take five for 33 in 19 overs and win the match. In the earlier Tests, amid the fast bowling and the clamour, not much had been heard of Verity, except as a rescuing batsman. But, when the last pinch came, there he was to relieve the weary line; very Yorkshire.
Verity never allowed the opinion that Bradman was less than a master on damaged pitches, refusing to stress the evidence of his own triumph at Lord’s in 1934 (Bradman c and b Verity 36; c Ames b Verity 13) and referring to Bradman’s two innings of 59 and 43 in 1938 against Yorkshire at Sheffield. “It was a pig of a pitch,” he said, “and he played me in the middle of the bat right through.” Maybe Verity’s opinion of Bradman was heightened by a natural generosity in its giver, but on this matter I think that Verity had reason to know best.
As an all-round fielder, Verity was no more than sound, but to his own bowling, or at backward point, he sometimes touched brilliance; and there sticks in the memory the catch that he made at Lord’s in 1938, when McCabe cut one from Farnes crack from the bat’s middle.
As a batsman for Yorkshire, Verity was mostly kept close to the extras. His build and reach suggested power and freedom, but it remained a suggestion; and he was analogous to those burly golfers who prod the tee-shot down the middle to a prim 180 yards. A casual observer might have mistaken Verity for Sutcliffe a little out of form, for he seemed to have caught something of that master’s style and gesture, and , like Sutcliffe, he could be clean bowled in a manner that somehow exonerated the batsman from all guilt. He never quite brought off “the double”, though in 1936 he took 216 wickets and scored 855 runs. But he had the sovereign gift of batting to an occasion. In the 1936-37 visit to Australia, G.O. Allen could find no opening pair to stay together, so he sent in Verity with C.J. Barnett in the fourth Test, at Adelaide, and they put up partnerships of 53 and 45. Not much, perhaps; but the best till then. In all Test matches, his batting average was close on 21; nearly 3 units higher than his average in all first-class cricket.
Verity had the look and carriage of a man likely to do supremely well something that would need time and trouble. His dignity was not assumed; it was the natural reflection of mind and body harmonised and controlled. He was solid, conscientious, disciplined; and something far more. In all that he did, till his most gallant end, he showed the vital fire, and warmed others in its flame. To the spectator in the field he may have seemed, perhaps, a little stiff and aloof; but among a known company he revealed geniality, wit, and an unaffected kindness that will not be forgotten.
There was no “breaking-point” with Verity; and his last reported words: “Keep going,” were but a text on his short and splendid life.
R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
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Within this Post lies the answer to the current question on the thread - Can you beat for the cricket Guru title .
This from the Cricinfo player page -
Wisden obituary
Hedley Verity, Captain, The Green Howards, died of wounds a prisoner of war in Italy on July 31, 1943, some two months after his thirty-eighth birthday. He had been reported wounded and missing, and the news of his death came on September 1, exactly four years after he had played his last match for Yorkshire and, at Hove, taken seven Sussex wickets for nine runs in one innings, which finished county cricket before the war.
He received his wounds in the Eighth Army’s first attack on the German positions at Catania, in Sicily. Eye-witnesses, who were a few yards from Verity when he was hit, have told the story. The objective was a ridge with strong points and pillboxes. Behind a creeping barrage Verity led his company forward 700 yards. When the barrage ceased, they went on another 300 yards and neared the ridge, in darkness. As the men advanced, through corn two feet high, tracer-bullets swept into them. Then they wriggled through the corn, Verity encouraging them with “Keep going, keep going.” The moon was at their back, and the enemy used mortar-fire, Very lights and fire-bombs, setting the corn alight. The strongest point appeared to be a farm-house, to the left of the ridge; so Verity sent one platoon round to take the farm-house, while the other gave covering fire. The enemy fire increased, and, as they crept forward, Verity was hit in the chest. “Keep going,” he said, “and get them out of that farm-house.” When it was decided to withdraw, they last saw Verity lying on the ground, in front of the burning corn, his head supported by his batman. So, in the last grim game, Verity showed, as he was so sure to do, that rare courage which both calculates and inspires.
Judged by any standard, Verity was a great bowler. Merely to watch him was to know that. The balance of the run up, the high ease of the left-handed action, the scrupulous length, the pensive variety, all proclaimed the master. He combined nature with art to a degree not equalled by any other English bowler of our time. He received a handsome legacy of skill and, by an application that verged on scientific research, turned it into a fortune. There have been bowlers who have reached greatness without knowing, or, perhaps, caring to know just how or why; but Verity could analyse his own intentions without losing the joy of surprise and describe their effect without losing the company of a listener. He was the ever-learning professor, justly proud yet utterly humble.
In the matter of plain arithmetic, so often torn from its context to the confusion of judgement, Verity, by taking 1,956 wickets at 14.87 runs each in ten years of first-class cricket, showed by far the best average of his time. In the recorded history of cricket the only bowlers of this class with lower averages are: Alfred Shaw, 2,072 wickets at 11.97 each; Tom Emmett, 1,595 wickets at 13.43 each; George Lohmann, 1,841 wickets at 13.73 each; James Southerton, 1,744 wickets at 14.30 each. It might be argued that during the period 1854 to 1898, covered by the careers of these cricketers, pitches tended to give more help to the bowler than they did during Verity’s time. Verity, I know, for one, would not have pressed such a claim in his own favour. He never dwelt on decimals; and, while he enjoyed personal triumph as much as the next man, that which absorbed his deepest interest was the proper issue of a Test match with Australia or of an up-and-down bout with Lancashire; and if, in his country’s or county’s struggle towards victory, he brought off some recondite plot for the confounding, of Bradman or McCabe or Ernest Tyldesley or Edward Paynter, well, then he was happy beyond computing.
Yet his bowling achievements, pressed into but overflowing the ten years of his career, were so rich and various that they here demand some concentrated notice.
He played in 40 Test matches, taking 144 wickets at 24.37 runs each. He took 100 wickets in Test cricket in a shorter period than any other English bowler.
He is the only cricketer who has taken 14 wickets in a day in a Test match, this feat being performed against Australia at Lord’s in the second Test, 1934. During this match, he took 15 wickets for 104 runs, thus sharing with Wilfred Rhodes, his Yorkshire predecessor, the honour of taking most wickets in an England v. Australia match.
Twice he took all 10 wickets in an innings; in 1931, against Warwickshire at Headingley, Leeds, for 36 runs in 18.4 (6-ball) overs, 6 maidens; in 1932, on the same ground, against Nottinghamshire, for 10 runs in 19.4 (6-ball) overs, 16 maidens – a world record in first-class cricket for the fewest number of runs conceded by a bowler taking all 10 wickets in an innings, and it included the hat-trick.
Against Essex at Leyton, in 1933, he took 17 wickets in one day, a record shared only by C. Blythe and T.W. Goddard.
In each of his nine full English seasons he took at least 150 wickets, and he averaged 185 wickets a season; thrice consecutively (1935-36-37) he took over 200 wickets. His average ranged from 12.42 to 17.63. He headed the first-class English bowling averages in his first season (1930) and in his last (1939), and never came out lower than fifth.
Verity was born at Headingley, but passed his twenty-fifth birthday before he played for Yorkshire, in 1930, the year that W. Rhodes retired. Some of his earlier seasons were spent in playing as an amateur for Rawdon in the Yorkshire Council; for Accrington in the Lancashire League; and for Middleton in the Central League. He was then, as always afterwards when allowed, an all-rounder. As a batsman, his height, reach, concentration and knowledge of what to avoid raised him distinctly from the ruck of mediocrity; but, whereas his bowling included grace, his batting had only style. The former was nature embellished by art; the latter was art improved by invention.
As a bowler, Hedley Verity stands, and will stand, with his illustrious predecessors in the Yorkshire attack: Edmund Peate (1879-1887), Robert Peel (1882-1899), Wilfred Rhodes (1898-1930) – the dates indicate the time of their respective playing careers – but Verity was not a slow left-hander in the accepted sense, and he used to reject comparision with Rhodes so far as method was concerned, saying: “both of us are left-handed and like taking wickets; let’s leave it at that.”
Verity’s mean pace was what is called slow-medium; on fast pitches, often about medium; and he would send down an inswinging yorker of an abrupt virulence not unworthy of George Hirst.
Naturally, on wet or crumbled or sticky pitches, he reduced pace and tossed the leg-spinner higher, but even here his variety of pace and of angle of delivery was remarkable. He was a born schemer; tireless, but never wild, in experiment; as sensitive in observation as a good host, or as an instrumentalist who spots a rival on the beat; the scholar who does not only dream, the inventor who can make it work.
Just how good a bowler was he? In relation to rivals in his own craft but of an earlier day, such a question is useless except to amuse an idle hour or to excite and idle quarrel. We can only say that, in his own short time, he was the best of his kind. In England, day in and day out, he may never have quite touched the greatness of Robert Peel, Colin Blythe or Wilfred Rhodes. In Australia, neither in 1932-33 or 1936-37, did he perplex their batsmen quite as J.C. White perplexed them in 1928-29, but, as a workman-artist, he will take some beating. H.B. Cameron, that fine wicket-keeper-batsman of South Africa, playing against Yorkshire in 1935, hit him for three fours and three sixes in one over; but very rarely did a batsman survive a liberty taken with Verity. He had, besides, a wonderful skill in restoring the “rabbits”, early and with little inconvenience, to the hutch.
If a touchstone of Verity’s greatness be needed, there is D.G. Bradman, the most inexorable scorer of runs that cricket has yet seen, whose Test match average against England stands at 91.42 in 46 innings. I think it was Verity who kept that average under 150. He was one of only three or four bowlers who came to the battle with Bradman on not unequal terms (haud impar congressus!); and Bradman was reported as saying: “I think I know all about Clarrie (Grimmett), but with Hedley I am never sure. You see, there’s no breaking point with him.”
Verity timed his blows. In the fifth Test match, at Sydney, early in 1933, Australia, 19 runs behind on the first innings, lost Victor Richardson for 0. Woodfull and Bradman added 115; Larwood, injured, had left the field – and that particular Larwood never came back – then Verity deceived Bradman in flight, bowled him for 71 and went on to take five for 33 in 19 overs and win the match. In the earlier Tests, amid the fast bowling and the clamour, not much had been heard of Verity, except as a rescuing batsman. But, when the last pinch came, there he was to relieve the weary line; very Yorkshire.
Verity never allowed the opinion that Bradman was less than a master on damaged pitches, refusing to stress the evidence of his own triumph at Lord’s in 1934 (Bradman c and b Verity 36; c Ames b Verity 13) and referring to Bradman’s two innings of 59 and 43 in 1938 against Yorkshire at Sheffield. “It was a pig of a pitch,” he said, “and he played me in the middle of the bat right through.” Maybe Verity’s opinion of Bradman was heightened by a natural generosity in its giver, but on this matter I think that Verity had reason to know best.
As an all-round fielder, Verity was no more than sound, but to his own bowling, or at backward point, he sometimes touched brilliance; and there sticks in the memory the catch that he made at Lord’s in 1938, when McCabe cut one from Farnes crack from the bat’s middle.
As a batsman for Yorkshire, Verity was mostly kept close to the extras. His build and reach suggested power and freedom, but it remained a suggestion; and he was analogous to those burly golfers who prod the tee-shot down the middle to a prim 180 yards. A casual observer might have mistaken Verity for Sutcliffe a little out of form, for he seemed to have caught something of that master’s style and gesture, and , like Sutcliffe, he could be clean bowled in a manner that somehow exonerated the batsman from all guilt. He never quite brought off “the double”, though in 1936 he took 216 wickets and scored 855 runs. But he had the sovereign gift of batting to an occasion. In the 1936-37 visit to Australia, G.O. Allen could find no opening pair to stay together, so he sent in Verity with C.J. Barnett in the fourth Test, at Adelaide, and they put up partnerships of 53 and 45. Not much, perhaps; but the best till then. In all Test matches, his batting average was close on 21; nearly 3 units higher than his average in all first-class cricket.
Verity had the look and carriage of a man likely to do supremely well something that would need time and trouble. His dignity was not assumed; it was the natural reflection of mind and body harmonised and controlled. He was solid, conscientious, disciplined; and something far more. In all that he did, till his most gallant end, he showed the vital fire, and warmed others in its flame. To the spectator in the field he may have seemed, perhaps, a little stiff and aloof; but among a known company he revealed geniality, wit, and an unaffected kindness that will not be forgotten.
There was no “breaking-point” with Verity; and his last reported words: “Keep going,” were but a text on his short and splendid life.
R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, Wisden Cricketers' Almanack
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