England vs India
1967-06-08
On 8 June 1967 at Headingley, Geoff Boycott carried his bat for an unbeaten 246 against India in 573 minutes. The selectors, watching the same innings from the Long Room, dropped him for the next Test. It was the only time in Test history that an unbeaten double-centurion was omitted from the next match for slow scoring.
England vs India
1952-06-05
When MCC named Len Hutton to lead England in the first Test against India in June 1952, it broke a tradition that had governed English cricket for more than half a century — only amateurs led the national side. Hutton, a Yorkshire professional and the country's leading batsman, refused to relinquish his professional status to take the job. The decision marked a quiet but decisive crack in cricket's class divide.
England vs India
1952-07-19
On 17 July 1952 at Old Trafford, the 21-year-old Yorkshire fast bowler Fred Trueman tore through India's first innings to take 8 for 31 in 8.4 overs — at the time the best Test innings figures by an England fast bowler since Jim Laker's spin and the best by an out-and-out paceman in Test history. India were dismissed for 58 and 82 in a single day's play, beaten by an innings and 207 runs. Trueman's series haul of 29 wickets at 13.31 announced the most charismatic English fast bowler of his generation.
Yorkshire / England (cricket); 1st Battalion Green Howards (military)
1943-07-31
Hedley Verity, the Yorkshire and England slow left-arm bowler whose 144 Test wickets at 24.37 included a record 15 wickets in a single Lord's Test, died on 31 July 1943 in a German-controlled hospital at Caserta after being severely wounded leading his platoon during the Allied invasion of Sicily. He was 38, and had not played first-class cricket since taking 7/9 against Sussex on the day Britain declared war. His death — alongside that of fellow Test cricketers Ken Farnes, Ross Gregory and Maurice Turnbull — became the most poignant individual loss cricket suffered in the Second World War.
Australia v England
1933-01-02
On 30 December 1932 at the MCG, Yorkshire's tall fast-medium bowler Bill Bowes, picked for England's Bodyline tour as Larwood's lieutenant, bowled Don Bradman first ball — a long hop that Bradman dragged on attempting to pull. Bowes finished with 1/50 in the innings; the first-ball duck is one of only seven in Bradman's Test career and has been retold in every history of the 1930s ever since.
Yorkshire v Essex
1932-06-16
On 15-16 June 1932 Herbert Sutcliffe (313) and Percy Holmes (224*) put on 555 for the first wicket against Essex at Leyton, breaking the world first-class record for any wicket and adding a layer of folklore — including a scoreboard that read 554 for several minutes and a hastily reversed declaration — that has clung to the partnership ever since.
Yorkshire v Nottinghamshire
1932-07-12
On 12 July 1932, slow left-armer Hedley Verity took 10 wickets for 10 runs at Headingley, dismissing a strong Nottinghamshire side for 67 in their second innings. The figures — 19.4 overs, 16 maidens, 10 for 10 — remain the best bowling analysis in the history of first-class cricket. Inside the spell were seven wickets in 15 deliveries, and a hat-trick. Yorkshire won by 10 wickets.
Yorkshire and England
1929-08-31
By 1929 Wilfred Rhodes was 51 years old and still bowling left-arm orthodox spin for Yorkshire — the senior statesman of English cricket who had bowled to W.G. Grace 30 years earlier and was now coaching the next generation. His final selection for England came in the 1929-30 West Indies tour, by which time he was 52.
Yorkshire and English County Championship
1925-08-31
Between 1922 and 1925 Yorkshire won four consecutive County Championship titles — the longest unbroken run by any county since the championship became official in 1890. Captained by Geoffrey Wilson and then Major Lupton, the side built around Sutcliffe, Holmes, Rhodes, Macaulay and Robinson lost only 11 of 116 matches across the four seasons.
Australia v England
1925-03-04
On his debut Test series, the 30-year-old Yorkshire opener Herbert Sutcliffe scored 734 runs in five Tests at an average of 81.55 — at the time the highest Test debut series aggregate by any batsman in cricket history.
Yorkshire and English County Championship
1923-09-08
In the 1923 County Championship Yorkshire won 25 of their 32 matches under Geoffrey Wilson — at the time the highest number of wins by any county in a single season since the modern Championship began in 1890.
England
1919-05-03
When the County Championship resumed in May 1919 after the four-year wartime break, the MCC introduced an experimental two-day match format with extended hours of play. Player exhaustion and a string of unsatisfactory finishes — many matches drawn, several rushed — led to the experiment being abandoned after a single season.
England
1916-07-01
Major William Booth — Major was his given name, not a rank — Yorkshire all-rounder and Test cricketer, was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, while serving with the 15th (Leeds Pals) West Yorkshire Regiment. He was 29.
England
1915-07-23
Edmund Wilson, a Cambridge Blue and amateur batsman who had played for Yorkshire before the war, was killed in action near Hooge in the Ypres salient in July 1915. He was 25.
Yorkshire
1914-09-01
Yorkshire were declared County Champions for 1914 with the season abandoned in late August. The title was their seventh and the last for any county before the four-year break for war. The team contained Hirst, Rhodes, Hobbs's friend Major Booth and Roy Kilner — half of whom would not play first-class cricket again.
England women's clubs
1914-07-01
The White Heather Club, founded in 1887 in Yorkshire, continued through the 1910s as the most prominent organised women's cricket club in England, playing exhibition matches and serving as the bridge between Victorian and modern women's cricket.
Yorkshire
1913-09-01
Schofield Haigh, the Yorkshire and England fast-medium bowler who had taken over 2,000 first-class wickets and had been the unsung partner of Hirst and Rhodes for two decades, retired from first-class cricket at the end of 1913 with worsening health. He died in 1921, his Yorkshire colleagues said, partly of grief at the war losses.
England
1910-12-15
Wilfred Rhodes had begun his Test career in 1899 batting at number eleven for England; through 1910-12 he was promoted up the order until, on the 1911-12 tour of Australia, he was opening with Jack Hobbs. The transformation produced one of cricket's great opening pairs and culminated in the 323-run stand at Melbourne.
Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, English counties
1908-09-01
Lord Hawke's Yorkshire went through the 1908 County Championship season unbeaten, winning the title for the eighth time under his captaincy. The season was capped by their dismissal of Northamptonshire for 27 and 15 — an aggregate of 42, the lowest in English first-class cricket — at Northampton in May, with Hirst taking 12 for 19 in the match.
Yorkshire, England
1908-08-31
Schofield Haigh, the Yorkshire medium-pacer with a sharp off-break, took 158 wickets at 12.51 in the 1902 county season — a strike rate matched in modern English cricket only by Colin Blythe (1912) and Harold Larwood (1931). Often the third bowler behind Hirst and Rhodes in published accounts, Haigh played 11 Tests for England and was a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1901.
Yorkshire CCC
1908-08-31
Under Lord Hawke's captaincy, Yorkshire won the County Championship in 1900, 1901, 1902, 1905 and 1908 — five titles in nine seasons. They went unbeaten in 1900 (their first such season) and again in 1908 ('the clean sheet championship'). Hirst, Rhodes and Haigh were the bowling backbone; Tunnicliffe, Brown and Denton scored the runs.
Yorkshire, England
1906-08-30
In 1906 Yorkshire's George Hirst scored 2,385 first-class runs at 45.86 and took 208 wickets at 16.50 — a 'double-double' (2,000 runs and 200 wickets) that no cricketer before or since has achieved in a single season. Wisden called it 'a feat unique in the history of the game' and it remains so 120 years on.
England, Australia
1905-08-21
Captaining England for the first time in 1905, Stanley Jackson won all five tosses against Joe Darling, topped both batting and bowling averages on either side (492 runs at 70.28; 13 wickets at 15.46), and led England to a 2-0 series win to retain the Ashes. He retired from Test cricket immediately afterwards, never having toured Australia.
England, Australia
1902-08-13
When Bill Lockwood was bowled at 248 for 9 in England's chase of 263 at The Oval on 13 August 1902, Wilfred Rhodes joined his Yorkshire team-mate George Hirst with 15 runs still required against Trumble, Saunders and Noble. The two professionals from Kirkheaton edged, deflected and sometimes simply blocked their way to a one-wicket win — the foundation of perhaps cricket's most famous (and most disputed) quotation, 'we'll get them in singles'.
England, Australia
1899-06-01
Wilfred Rhodes made his Test debut at Trent Bridge in June 1899 — the same match that proved to be W.G. Grace's last Test. Rhodes' Test career would span 30 years 313 days, the longest in history; he would also be the oldest Test player ever (52 years 165 days). Through the 1900s he was first England's slow left-arm spinner and then, by 1909, an opening batsman.
England v Australia
1899-06-01
On 1 June 1899, the 21-year-old Yorkshire left-arm spinner Wilfred Rhodes opened England's bowling against Australia at Trent Bridge and took 4 for 58 in 35.1 overs on debut. The same Test marked W.G. Grace's last appearance. Rhodes would play another 57 Tests across the next 31 years, finishing with the longest Test career in cricket history — the only man to play with both W.G. Grace and Don Bradman.
Yorkshire v Middlesex
1897-08-18
On 18 August 1897, Yorkshire's left-arm spinner Bobby Peel — at that point England's most successful slow bowler and a 100-Test-wicket man — turned up drunk on the third day of a Championship match against Middlesex at Bramall Lane. Lord Hawke ordered him from the field, and the Yorkshire committee suspended him for the rest of the season. Peel never played for Yorkshire again. The decision opened the door for the 19-year-old Wilfred Rhodes, who would take 4,184 first-class wickets across the next 33 years.
Yorkshire
1894-12-01
Lord Hawke captained Yorkshire from 1883 to 1910, taking the side from a hard-drinking ungovernable team to four County Championships in the 1890s. His most enduring change had nothing to do with on-field tactics: he introduced winter pay for professionals (who until then earned only during the summer), made benefit money trustee-managed for long-term security, and dismissed players he felt failed in their conduct. Bobby Peel's 1897 sacking was the most famous case.
Yorkshire CCC
1893-08-31
Yorkshire won their first official County Championship in 1893, three years after the formal competition began. Captained by Lord Hawke — though the 33-year-old amateur played only eleven of the matches — they won twelve fixtures and lost just one, beginning an era that would produce eight titles in 16 years. The 1893 side was the first product of Hawke's drive for professional discipline; the players included Bobby Peel, George Hirst and Stanley Jackson.
Yorkshire / England
1888-08-31
Bobby Peel of Yorkshire was the second great left-arm spinner of his county after Edmund Peate, and quickly the better of the two. He made his first-class debut in 1882, became Yorkshire's first-choice slow left-armer when Peate was sacked for drunkenness in 1887, took 100 wickets a season for the next decade and was named one of the first six Wisden Cricketers of the Year in 1889. By 1888 he was already England's frontline spinner, sharing 27-wicket days with Lohmann at Lord's against Australia.
Australia v England
1883-01-19
On 19 January 1883 Billy Bates of Yorkshire took the first hat-trick by an England bowler in a Test match — McDonnell, Giffen and Bonnor in successive deliveries — on the way to match figures of 14 for 102 and an innings win for Bligh's team at the MCG. It remained the only Ashes hat-trick by an England bowler for the rest of the 19th century.
England v Australia
1882-08-29
With England needing 10 to beat Australia at The Oval and the Cambridge amateur CT Studd waiting at the non-striker's end, Yorkshire professional Ted Peate took strike at number 11, swung at Harry Boyle and was bowled. Asked in the dressing room why he hadn't simply blocked and given Studd the strike, Peate is supposed to have replied, 'I couldn't trust Mr Studd.' The line — Yorkshire pro on Cambridge amateur — has outlived everyone involved.
Alfred Mynn (Kent) vs James Dearman (Yorkshire)
1837-08-21
In August 1837 the Sheffield batsman James Dearman, smarting from his innings-and-107 thrashing at Town Malling the previous September, demanded a return single-wicket match against Alfred Mynn. The rematch was played at Brighton on 21-22 August 1837 and went the same way as the first: Mynn won by an innings and 67 runs.
Alfred Mynn (Kent) vs James Dearman (Yorkshire)
1836-09-29
On 29 and 30 September 1836 the giant Kent fast bowler Alfred Mynn — already nicknamed 'the Lion of Kent' — met the Sheffield batsman James Dearman in a £100-a-side single-wicket challenge at Town Malling in Kent. Mynn, then 28 and weighing close to twenty stone, demolished Dearman: he scored 123 runs to Dearman's 0 and 16, and won by an innings and 107.
Yorkshire, North
1833-09-05
Tom Marsden of Sheffield was the leading northern batsman of the early 1830s and the man who carried Yorkshire cricket through the decade. A left-handed bat of unusual power, he had scored 227 in a single innings as early as 1826 — at the time the highest individual score in English cricket. By the early 1830s he was the natural counterweight to Pilch in any North vs South discussion.
Sheffield vs Nottingham
1822-08-12
The first major match at Sheffield's Darnall ground in 1822, a 15 of Sheffield v 11 of Nottingham fixture, was marred when a temporary spectators' stand collapsed under the weight of the crowd, injuring nearly two dozen people. The incident was the first known crowd-safety disaster in English cricket and a foretaste of Lord's-era complaints about hastily built spectator scaffolding.
MCC committee vs George Osbaldeston
1818-08-01
After losing a single-wicket match to Lord Frederick Beauclerk in 1818 in circumstances that he believed were rigged against him, the Yorkshire squire George Osbaldeston resigned from the Marylebone Cricket Club in a fit of temper. When he tried to rejoin some months later he found the door barred: Beauclerk, on the committee, refused his readmission. E.H. Budd's attempted intercession failed. Osbaldeston, one of the leading all-round sportsmen of the age, never played senior cricket of any standing again.