On Yorkshire cricket, and especially on Yorkshire bowlers, volumes might be written, but powerful as the county is now in the present, and has been in the past, it has not been free from the ordinary vicissitudes of life in general and of cricket in particular, to which fact allusion has been made earlier in this chapter. It has also been stated before that Sheffield was the original home of Yorkshire cricket, being a club strong enough to play the rest of the county and beat it, and boasting in Dearman and Marsden, the famous left-hander, two of the great stars of the early nineteenth century. However, the county club was organised in 1862, with the Sheffield ground at Bramall Lane as its headquarters, though the big county is so rich in fine grounds that it distributes its favours among many towns. In the plethora of great professionals the amateur element has always been in a minority in the county eleven, though the names of Lord Hawke, T. L. Taylor, Frank Mitchell, and F. S. Jackson, and in a quieter way of George Savile, Rev. E. S. Carter, A. Sellers, F. W. Milligan, E. T. Hirst, and R. W. Frank, will always be familiar to cricketers, to which may be added that of G. A. B. Leatham, whose wicket-keeping powers would have found him a place in many a good county eleven; but the county of Pinder and the two Hunters has not been hard up for a custodian for many years. Of the amateurs, be it said that no more brilliant all-round cricketer has walked out of a pavilion than F. S. Jackson, and that in Lord Hawke the county found an ideal man, apart from his batting powers, to command its side, a side, too, that has for many years been composed exclusively of Yorkshire-born men. Lord Hawke found the county at a low ebb, shared its struggle upward, and is finally the proud leader of a body of men that lost but two county matches in three years, and he has had the additional satisfaction of helping to raise the county to such admirable financial condition, that it is able to treat its professionals with a liberality that but few other counties can emulate or even approach. It is not unnatural in consequence that the Yorkshire eleven should be practically a band of very happy and contented brothers. The names of the great county bowlers are legion: every one has read of Freeman and Emmett, Ulyett and Bates and Peate, Hirst and Rhodes, Slinn, Atkinson, Allan Hill, Peel, Haigh, Ulyett and Wainwright, but one notes with interest how many of these have been left-handers. Then the batsmen—Stephenson (E.), Rowbotham, Iddison (a lob bowler of much merit), the Greenwoods (Luke and Andrew), Ephraim Lockwood (of wonderful cutting powers), Bates, Louis Hall (the pioneer of stickers), Peel, Brown and Tunnicliffe, Denton and Wainwright, cum multis aliis. It is indeed a wonderful list of names, names of cricketers of all sorts and conditions, as versatile as they are numerous. One wonders, considering the years that they cover, that Yorkshire has ever been anything but champion county, especially as the names excluded are only a whit less well known than those that are included.
THE CRICKET GROUND AT DARNALL, NEAR SHEFFIELD.
Such in brief is the history, a mere sketch, of our more important counties, their rise and their fall: a full and complete account of them would fill the whole of a goodly volume, which would be replete with interest and anecdote, but which would require the patience and the genius of a Macaulay or a Froude for its adequate and comprehensive compilation. Cricket may indeed be but a mere pastime, but it is a pastime that has come home to the hearts of Englishmen, or at least to the hearts of a goodly number of Englishmen, during a period of some two hundred years. He who would write that history must be a man of infinite patience and vast perseverance. He will not find cricket history writ large in columns of big print, but, for the earlier days at least, often packed away in obscure corners of local journals. Thirty years ago there was no daily sporting paper, while the big “dailies” took but little notice of cricket matches. Add a hundred years on to the thirty, and only local papers record a great match. Consequently, he who would write a full and accurate account of the cricket played by the counties, must rummage even more painfully than the recorder of political facts, and in journals that are far less accessible and that give less prominence to the special facts of which the writer is in quest. The great work may yet be written, but the writing thereof will be largely a labour of love, for the divers into cricket lore are but few, and the writer will naturally wonder whether the game will be worth the candle.
| From a Painting by | J. Lush. |
THE EARL OF MARCH.