by Mayukh Ghosh
George Hirst and Wilfred Rhodes.
The legendary names from Yorkshire who were the subjects of many a legend.
“We’ll get ‘em in singles” being the most famous among them. The imagined quote that is more real to many than authentic ones.
There are jokes too. Most of them typical Yorkshire.
A typical Yorkshireman can hardly ever zero in on the best all-rounder in the history of the game.
The response always is: “I don’t know, but he was born in Kirkheaton and batted right handed and bowled left handed.”
Given such status, and given the English penchant for biographies of all and sundry in county cricket, for some unexplained reason, they could never quite attract a lot of interest from potential biographers.
A.A. Thomson wrote a book on them.
Sidney Rogerson wrote one on Rhodes when he was still alive.
Much later, Stephen Chalke wrote a booklet on Hirst, primarily celebrating THAT season of 1906.
And, very recently, Patrick Ferriday came up with the most comprehensive work on Rhodes.
Schofield Haigh didn’t even get that.
A giant of Yorkshire cricket but he never got a book written on him.
Worse still, these days he is hardly remembered in his own county.
Harry Pearson, initially interested in Hirst’s story, has now written a book on these three stalwarts of Yorkshire cricket.
Pearson regularly writes on football and has in the past written award-winning cricket books.
He had been introduced to sports very early in his life.
“I was born just south of Middlesbrough in the North Riding of Yorkshire in 1961 - too young to remember England winning the football World Cup or Yorkshire winning their last County Championship (1968) for 33 years...
”My father had been a keen cricketer. A wicketkeeper/ batsman, he played for Marske in the North Yorkshire South Durham League. In my teens I'd play a few games with him in the works leagues around Teesside (he was an engineer at Cleveland Bridge steelworks) - one of the more memorable of which is documented in my book Slipless in Settle.”
Then, in 1971, much like Indian cricket, things changed drastically for him.
“I started following cricket in 1971 - one of my first memories of watching the game on TV is Abid Ali helping India win the Oval Test.
“The North Yorkshire South Durham League was a high standard of cricket and all of the clubs employed overseas professionals. (In the 1970s Desmond Haynes, Lance Cairns and Albert Padmore played in it) so I started watching cricket by going to see those matches. Pros like Cairns and Nasim-ul-Ghani, a Pakistani who'd played a few Tests would regularly smash the ball fifty yards out of the ground, scattering people who were shopping in the nearby streets.... but they'd also get clean bowled for 5 by a man who worked in the newsagents!
“In those days Yorkshire still played a county championship match at Acklam Park in Middlesbrough, so the first "proper" game I saw was Yorkshire v Essex. I have an idea Geoff Boycott scored a very slow hundred, but then he made a habit of that, didn't he?
“When I was a bit older my father would drive us over to Scarborough to see John Player Sunday league matches. Yorkshire were pretty hopeless throughout his time, but a few players became my heroes - Jack Hampshire and, of course, Chris Old who came from Middlesbrough. Later David Bairstow and Graham Stevenson came on the scene and livened things up a bit - though Yorkshire still couldn't win anything...”
Playing first XI cricket and getting the first taste of watching Test cricket followed soon.
“The first Test Match I went to see was at Headingly in 1975, the Monday of the abandoned Ashes Test. Thomson and Lillee bowling for Australia; Tony Grieg and Alan Knott batting for England. Quite an introduction to the top level of the game. We went to the Monday of the Test every year after that, and later when I moved to London my father would come down for the Monday of the Lords Test (in those days you could still queue up and buy a ticket on the day - hard to imagine now...). I always loved fast bowlers and that was a great period for them - Michael Holding was my favourite, followed by Thomson.
“I started playing cricket for my school age groups teams when I was 14 and got into the first XI when I was around 15. The school had quite a lot of boys who played for clubs in the NYSD League, so the cricket team was quite a decent standard (our football team was useless - I think the worst defeat I ever played in was 14-1!). I opened the bowling and batted at number four trying to imitate my hero Tony Grieg (in those days I had blond hair and was already 6 feet four, so you can see why...) without much success. Later I gave up on batting (or rather batting gave up on me - I am hopeless, uncoordinated and once I started playing against bowlers who could swing the ball in the air I was totally dumbfounded) and concentrated on bowling. In London I played club cricket for many happy years - Saturdays and Sundays all through the summer.”
And then, eventually, the writing bit.
“I also started writing about cricket around that time - often about the characters I played with or against, or the people I sat near at Lords or the Oval. I had a couple of pieces accepted by The Cricketer in the mid-1980s and shortly after that I was made redundant from my job in the wine trade and decided - on very limited evidence - that I could be a full-time journalist. Remarkably I have been doing that ever since....”
The serious stuff actually began with football when he started writing for When Saturday Comes in 1988. He still writes for them.
And a few years ago he wrote a book on Flemish cycling.
The cricket writing was always there and most of his books have been liked by important critics, most notably a biography of the great Learie Constantine.
When asked about the reason behind choosing to write on the three Yorkshiremen, he said,
“The idea of writing ‘First of the Summer Wine’ came when I was writing The Trundlers. I read a lot about George Hirst. It was plain that not only was he extraordinarily popular around England because he was such a nice, happy man, but that his personality at that time was seen as the personification of Yorkshire. He was often described as ‘big-hearted, warm and good humoured - a typical Yorkshireman’.
“It struck me that since that time the image of what people from Yorkshire are like had changed - become a good deal less positive - and much of that was down to the cricket team and the way they played and acted. Pelham Warner said of Hirst that "It did your heart good to see him smile". I don't think anyone would have said that about Fred Trueman or Geoff Boycott. At some point (I think in the 1930s) Yorkshire became a personification of a kind of hard-bitten grim-faced cricket that was often combined with nastiness and arrogance (this was long before all the recent revelations of racism).
“Reading about Hirst and Schofield Haigh - who was also hugely popular with everyone - made me wonder how and why things had changed. Writing about Yorkshire's three greatest wicket-takers - born within a few miles of each other - gave me a chance to explore that as well as tell the story of these three remarkable professionals.
”Nobody had ever written a biography of Hirst (AA Thomson wrote a combined biography of Hirst and Rhodes in the 1950s) and when I started writing the book the only biography of Rhodes had been published in the early 1960s (ironically since then Patrick Ferriday has written a wonderful book about him).
Schofield Haigh was barely known even in Yorkshire - I only knew about him from watching Armitage Bridge CC - Haigh's old club - play in the Huddersfield League. Since the three of them were big friends it seemed a good idea to combine them all.
“They came from the countryside outside Huddersfield which is the setting for a once very popular BBC situation comedy "The Last of the Summer Wine" which is about the adventures of three genial old Yorkshiremen, so....”
Pearson readily admitted that the age of internet had made his job much easier than that of a Thomson or a Rogerson.
“Luckily there are resources available to writers now that weren't around when Rogerson and Thompson were writing. The most notable of these are searchable on-line newspaper databases. Haigh gave a number of interviews to local papers in Yorkshire and Scotland that revealed a lot about his character - his fear of injury or loss of form, the nagging doubts about his own ability. Rhodes wrote dozens of articles for the local press in Yorkshire that likewise reveal aspects of his character that I think hadn't been explored before. Hirst was more guarded publicly, but there was a lot written about him by people who knew him that also appeared in local newspapers - some times in the letters' pages.
”I spent a lot of time digging through these archives and - or so I hope - found fresh information about the three players. I also tried to give some social context to their careers - the battle between professionals and gentlemen, between the people who ran cricket and the men who played it etc - and show how the triumvirate shaped the way cricket was played Yorkshire and how they helped make being a cricketer respectable.”
And, finally, when I asked him if given another chance, would he be tempted to do anything differently, his response was that of a writer who had ‘been there, done that’ too many times!
”To paraphrase Paul Valery: books are never finished, they are only abandoned. ‘First of the Summer Wine’ is something like my fourteenth book, so I guess I've got used to the idea of never truly being satisfied with them. After the book has gone to the printer it really is out of your hands, and, of course, that is the moment you discover something new that you wished you'd included. It always happens!”
The book has been published by Simon & Schuster and is available from all the usual outlets.