All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

168 Frank Smailes happily having taken four for 14 in ten overs. It only needed about an hour the next morning to wrap things up. At first the overnight pair Worthington and Bert ‘Dusty’ Rhodes settled in well, but when they went 56 for four quickly became 79 for nine, top-scorer Worthington (32) having been brilliantly caught one-handed at slip by Arthur Mitchell. Tommy Mitchell (no relation) is the sort of batsmen most bowlers like to see coming in at number 11. However Smailes had to wait a while for his all-ten as Mitchell helped his captain, Thomas Hounsfield, put on 18. With plenty of time to spare, captain Sellers could afford to instruct Smurthwaite, bowling at the other end, to do his best not to take the final wicket. Smailes finally got his man off the first ball of his eighteenth over when the Derbyshire leg- spinner was stumped by Wood’s stand-in Ken Fiddling, who conceded just one bye in the match on his Championship debut. After the War Fiddling, like many Yorkshiremen, would move on to find regular cricket elsewhere (with Northamptonshire). The official Derbyshire captain in 1939 was Robin Buckston, but on occasions when he wasn’t available another amateur was needed to do the job and Hounsfield was brought in. A batsman of limited achievement who made one fifty and seven ducks in a 16-match career, Hounsfield nevertheless did well to outscore most of his more illustrious colleagues. Swinging the ball both ways Smailes had taken full advantage of a pitch made faster by hot morning sunshine. Hitting the stumps six times and dismissing George Pope leg-before he hadn’t needed toomuch help fromhis fielders. Not surprisingly he had bowled unchanged throughout the match. The full attendance for the match had been 12,000, but unfortunately only 500 were there on the last morning to applaud Smailes’ feat. The match finished at 12.15. According to the Sheffield Daily Telegraph , Smailes was playing bowls by 1.15! One of Derbyshire’s greatest, Cliff Gladwin, was making his first-class debut in the match. With 0-36 in eight overs and two ducks it was an inauspicious start. He would play three more wicketless games before the War, but when he returned to the county game in 1946 aged 30 his impact was immediate and he remains his county’s second highest wicket-taker. He took nine wickets in an innings three times. And one of them was so near to being an all-ten. At close of play on 21 June 1947 at Buxton, he had figures of nine for 119 as Lancashire finished on 350 for nine, with batsmen 10 and 11 at the wicket. Unfortunately the visitors’ captain, Ken Cranston, declared first thing next morning. Herbert Baldwin, one of only seven umpires to stand in over 600 matches, had seen his second all-ten, after officiating whilst Verity took his famous ten for 10 seven years earlier. Smailes saw active service in the Mediterranean as a captain in the Royal Artillery. It was fitting that, together with Phil King, a Yorkshireman who played for Lancashire and Worcestershire, he located Hedley Verity’s grave at Caserta and arranged for the erection of a monument on it. Having taken 822 first-class wickets at an average of 20.81 Smailes retired from county cricket at the end of the 1948 season, partly because varicose