Chapter Sixteen Roses in Bloom In the 21 seasons between the wars only five clubs won the Championship: Yorkshire 12 times, Lancashire five, Middlesex twice and Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire once each. The Roses stranglehold can be carried a stage further. In only two seasons, 1921 and 1936, were neither of these counties in first or second place – but in both campaigns Yorkshire finished third. During the seven seasons from 1922 to 1928, Yorkshire won the title in the first four and Lancashire the last three. Such dominance was reflected in the power struggles which took place annually at Whitsuntide and August Bank Holiday, in particular those of the 1920s. They represented county cricket at its highest technical peak – and sometimes, from the entertainment point of view, at its worst. In those 21 summers, 42 matches were played, Yorkshire winning 13, Lancashire five and 24 being drawn, nine of them consecutively from 1927 to 1931. All of Lancashire’s home games were at Old Trafford, alternating each season between the two holidays. Bradford’s Park Avenue ground, Headingley and Bramall Lane at Sheffield, allocated on a rota system, were the Yorkshire venues. Each county produced immensely strong teams. Lancashire in 1926 could field Harry Makepeace, Charlie Hallows, Ernest Tyldesley, Frank Watson, Jack Iddon, the emerging Len Hopwood, the captain Major Leonard Green, Frank Sibbles, Richard Tyldesley, Ted McDonald and the wicket-keeper George Duckworth. Eight of them played Test cricket; during inter-war Roses games Ernest Tyldesley made four hundreds, Hallows three, Makepeace and Watson two apiece. The bowlers’ equivalent, five wickets in an innings, was performed by McDonald (five), Richard Tyldesley (four) and Sibbles (three). The Makepeace-Hallows opening combination (Makepeace and Watson exchanged places in 1927) came third among all county teams in the period, behind Hobbs and Sandham and Holmes and Sutcliffe. A year earlier, in 1925, Yorkshire had won their fourth consecutive title with a team of awesome power: Percy Holmes, Herbert Sutcliffe, Edgar Oldroyd, Morris Leyland, Wilfred Rhodes, Roy Kilner, Emmott Robinson, the captain Major Arthur Lupton, George Macaulay, the wicket-keeper Arthur Dolphin and Abe Waddington. Again there were eight Test cricketers. The Roses centurions during the inter-war period were Sutcliffe (nine), Holmes (six) and Leyland (two). Rhodes, Robinson and Macaulay each had three five-fors and Kilner two. Sutcliffe played in 41 of the 42 matches, scoring 3,006 runs, average 52.74. Cardus revelled in it all. From the artisans – Rhodes and Robinson disagreeing over a rain-affected pitch at Bradford, Rhodes predicting it would take spin at four o’clock and Robinson saying ‘Nay Wilfred, quarter past’ – to the lyrical: “The old occasion comes again – Lancashire and Yorkshire at Old Trafford, the game spiky with antagonism, the crowd now shouting joy to the sky and now 69