The Yorkshire side of the 1920s were ruthlessly efficient
You’ll remember we left English cricket in 1919 just as it started its rise from the ruins of war – Merses profundo, pulchrior evenit. What emerged from the wreckage was certainly more stunning that anything the county game had seen before.
The 1919 County Championship was won by Yorkshire, and the 1920 campaign was a thrilling race with any one of five sides in the hunt until finally Middlesex prevailed on the last evening of the season in front of the largest crowd ever seen at Lord’s for a county match. It was a win for the sentimentalists, coming as it did in the last match of Plum Warner’s career.
Middlesex retained the title the following season, but then Yorkshire embarked on a period of dominance that – with the exception of a blip in the late 1920s – continued until 1939.
This remarkable streak was sustained by two distinct sides – the Yorkshire XI that won four consecutive titles from 1922 to 1925 and the team that won seven of the ten championships of the 1930s. Which of the two sides was the greater remains up for debate.
The Yorkshire side of the 1920s were ruthlessly efficient, winning eighty-six and losing just seven of the 141 matches played in those four title-winning seasons. There was strength all round with five batsmen in the 1922 season scoring more than 1,000 runs – Edgar Oldroyd, Herbert Sutcliffe, Wilfred Rhodes, Percy Holmes and Roy Kilner. But it was their bowling attack that terrorised opponents. ‘For every variety of condition Yorkshire had the corresponding bowler,’ wrote Harry Altham in 1926. Spinners Rhodes and Kilner were as effective with the ball as with the bat, while in George Macaulay and Emmott Robinson the White Rose County had two of the finest fast bowlers of their time. Robinson, said Altham, was so dangerous simply because he adhered to the two guiding principles of fast bowling: ‘He pitched it right up and made the batsmen go on playing by bowling it straight.’ As for Macaulay, he reached his peak in 1925, taking 200 wickets as Yorkshire vanquished all before them, winning twenty-one times and losing not once.
The late 1920s was a time of transition for Yorkshire. Holmes, Oldroyd and Robinson were by now past their peak, Kilner died of enteric fever on his way back from India and even the indefatigable Rhodes yielded to Old Father Time. Not, however, before he ‘had spent one valuable summer introducing Verity to the arts of length and deception’.
Verity was Hedley Verity, who by the time of his death in action in 1943 had become one of the greatest slow left-arm bowlers of any age. He announced himself to the world by taking all ten Warwickshire wickets for just 36 runs in a 1931 county match, a feat he repeated the following year against Nottinghamshire. This time Verity’s figures were ten wickets for 10 runs in 19.4 overs, and they included a hat-trick. Neville Cardus once wrote of Verity that his approach to the wicket ‘so loose and effortless was feline in its suggestion of silkiness hiding its claws’.
The Yorkshire side of the 1920s were ruthlessly efficient
Verity wasn’t alone in savaging Yorkshire’s opponents; Herbert Sutcliffe reached his zenith in the 1930s. In 1931, when they regained the championship title after a break of five years, the England opener scored over 2,000 runs at an average of 97.57.
The third member of the triumvirate was the 6-foot-4-inch Bill Bowes, a fast-medium bowler of rare guile who could change from an in-swinger to an away-swinger with barely a change of action. In 372 first-class matches Bowes took 1,639 wickets at 16.76, the majority of them during Yorkshire’s dominance of the 1930s.
County champions in 1931, they retained the title the following two years before Lancashire stole their crown in 1934. Yorkshire seized it back the next season, and though Derbyshire took the title in 1936, the last three seasons of the decade were all Yorkshire’s. ‘There have been many essays from time to time on the “Golden Age of Cricket”,’ mused Gordon Ross in his 1972 book A History of Cricket. ‘But who is competent to judge a golden age? Does distance lend enchantment? Were the days of one’s youth as enchanting as they seem in retrospect?… Yorkshiremen though (and who better to judge their own players) will tell you that the ’thirties was a golden age of Yorkshire cricket.’