All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

186 Trevor Bailey taken an all-ten (or even a nine-for) in the 60 first-class matches played at Vista Road. He probably liked the ground, even though he made a pair against Yorkshire there in 1952. No other Essex player has scored more runs there or taken more wickets. Essex batted feebly on the second day losing 19 wickets and the match. According to The Times some batsmen had been handicapped by a thick sea mist obscuring part of the ground. (And was the problem compounded by the proximity of the nearby railway line from which John Arlott had once recorded engines had ‘belched a fog of smoke over the ground’?) In their second innings Essex were confounded by the spin of Roberts. Almost thirty-five, Roberts had had considerable success since the War, but his career was nearing its end; kept out of the side by the burgeoning talent of Lancashire’s younger spinners, he died of cancer in 1951. Umpire Claud ‘Dick’ Woolley, an older brother of the great Frank, had also officiated just three years before when Eric Hollies had taken his famous all-ten. It was Woolley’s penultimate Championship match: having played in 365 first- class matches (all but three for Northants), he then umpired another 281. Achieving the first of his eight seasonal doubles and appearing in all four Tests against Walter Hadlee’s New Zealanders, 1949 had been a breakthrough year for Bailey. The Clacton Week was not without interest for him the following year. He was injury prone, and in the first match bowled six overs and then went off for a massage. On return, as he prepared to bowl, Sussex captain James Langridge objected. After consultation it was agreed he would not bowl for an hour. In the second match he bowled his side to victory with a second-innings eight for 70 against Kent. Essex captain from 1961 to 1966, Bailey retired at the end of the 1967 season. For a time he had seemed to be heir apparent to Len Hutton as England captain. However, the claims of Peter May, and the dim view taken by the establishment of the newspaper serialisation of his book Playing to Win, put an end to that. Only Peter Smith and Stan Nichols exceeded (just) Bailey’s 1,593 wickets for Essex, and neither got near his 21,000 runs for them. Bailey was always a busy man, even when playing cricket full-time. In 1948 Essex had offered him the post of assistant secretary, in effect paying him to play whilst retaining his amateur status. In 1955 he was appointed county secretary, a more onerous role. For a few seasons Bailey, a pacy forward, had a successful football career with Leytonstone and then Walthamstow Avenue (both sadly now defunct clubs) at a time when the amateur game attracted big crowds. It climaxed with an Amateur Cup winners’ medal at Wembley in April 1952 before a crowd of 100,000, and a visit to Old Trafford the following season which saw Avenue hold Manchester United to a 1-1 draw in the fourth round of the FA Cup. He wrote, was engaged in various business and promotional activities, and of course was a long-serving and much-admired member of BBC’s Test Match Special team. Tragically, in 2011 he died in a fire at his flat in Westcliff- on-Sea.