All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

147 a Staffordshire attack that included Sydney (S.F.) Barnes, he already had some experience in resisting great bowlers. Verity would take five or more wickets in an innings 164 times in his career, but would only do so three times in 14 matches against Notts. With the exception of Somerset (against whom he only played four times) Verity took fewer wickets against Notts than against any other county. Yorkshire needed 139 to win but Notts didn’t really have the bowlers to take advantage of the helpful conditions and Holmes (his second fifty of a low-scoring match) and Sutcliffe, putting on 100 together yet again, comfortably reached the target in 100 minutes with an hour to spare. At the end of the match scorecards as souvenirs were much in demand, as was Verity to autograph them. Verity again finished as one of the season’s leading wicket-takers and his form had booked him a trip to Australia and New Zealand the following winter where he took 11 Australian wickets and came second in the Test averages. Poignantly, the last time Verity bowled in a first-class match, at Hove on 1 September 1939 , with war certain, he gave a final demonstration of his remarkable skills, taking seven for 9 as Sussex were skittled for 33 on a drying wicket. Nearly four years later, in a sad parallel with the death of another great left-arm bowler, Colin Blythe, in the First World War, Captain Hedley Verity of the Green Howards died in a military hospital in Caserta, Italy 11 days after being seriously injured in Sicily. A popular, dignified and caring man, he was only 38 and might have contributed fully to the English game when hostilities ended. Hedley Verity