Famous Cricketers No 60 - Ernest Tyldesley

Introduction My only previous contribution to this series of Famous Cricketers covered the career of one of my great childhood heroes, the late Brian Statham. The inspiration for the work was thus gained first hand from watching him bowl so it was indeed a tremendous pleasure to be able to liaise with Brian himself during the final stages of its compilation. I cannot claim any such knowledge of Ernest Tyldesley, though I am quite sure my late father (Tyldesley’s senior by a couple of years) would have seen him batting at Old Trafford on numerous occasions. To me the Tyldesleys were simply among the great names from the past, still figuring atop the all-time lists of Lancashire batsmen, eulogised by Cardus, but belonging to a somewhat indeterminate period within the “golden age of cricket”. It was only when I lent Peter Griffiths a hand with the cataloguing of the first-class matches of the seasons immediately following the First World War that all these old Lancashire names started to slip into place. At long last I discovered who was a contemporary of whom and how they performed as a team; the selection of the England Test sides took on more relevance as I became able to weigh the merits of those chosen against the performances both of themselves and of the other contenders. Running right through the period 1919-1932 (and, indeed, encompassing it by some years) was Ernest Tyldesley. He had started out in the era of MacLaren and Hornby and was still going strong when the young Cyril Washbrook arrived on the scene. What was even more fascinating about him was the way his powers of run gathering seemed to improve as the years passed; well into his twenties before he could command a regular place, he was actually 31 before he gained any national recognition; at 32 he was picked for England for the first time and subsequently made sporadic appearances until he reached 40; he won only 14 caps, yet averaged 55 with three test hundreds to his name. Even then one could argue that his best years were still ahead of him as he continued to amass Championship runs galore. In 1934 - still, painfully, Lancashire’s last outright Championship winning season - he scored 2,487 runs at 57.83, whilst his eight hundreds included the one that made him his county’s only achiever of the century of centuries. All that at the age of 45! To chronicle such a long and wonderful career offered the prospect of an absorbing challenge, all the more so since it soon became apparent that the business of cross-checking with scorebooks would present much greater problems than it had with the career of Brian Statham. By way of compensation, of course, was the far more detailed and accurate reporting of county cricket by the press in those years which meant that almost as much time was to be spent in libraries as at Old Trafford and other grounds. My only regret is that it has apparently proved impracticable to include an innovation I felt worthwhile, i.e. the individual fall of wickets scores at which Tyldesley came and went in each of his 648 innings. The research for this material added some considerable time to the book’s preparation and I believe it gave valuable insight into the duration of each innings. In view of their kind assistance I have retained the names of people who helped in this aspect of the task in the list of those deserving acknowledgement. The whole exercise has proved fascinating and I now feel I have lived through the great years of Lancashire cricket, of Makepeace and Sharp, of Hallows and Watson, of Iddon and Paynter and of Ernest Tyldesley himself. I sincerely hope that some of the feel of that age and of the splendid career of a true Lancashire legend will perhaps come alive to readers of this book. Geoff Wilde July 1999 3