Remembering a gentle giant for Yorkshire CCC and England with the magical touch

As a hobbyist magician (a proud member of the Magic Circle), Bowes knew all the old tricks and plenty more, entertaining players and punters alike.

Following his career with Yorkshire and England, for whom he charged in as one of the best fast-medium bowlers of the inter-war period, Bowes was a coach and mentor, a journalist and author, a public speaker and occasional broadcaster, his active association with the game spanning a good 60 years.

It was with sleight of mind rather than sleight of hand that Bowes took the wicket for which he is remembered. In December 1932, during the second Test of the Bodyline series at Melbourne, he dismissed Don Bradman for a golden duck.

Sensing that Bradman was expecting a bouncer, Bowes sent down a ball not quite as short which Bradman pulled into his stumps.

According to Jack Fingleton, the non-striker, Bowes turned to the umpire amid the stunned silence and said, “Well, I’ll be damned”, or words to that effect.

Although Bowes’s Test career was disappointingly brief (just 15 games that brought him 68 wickets at 22.33), he was one of the game’s most recognisable figures.

As his obituary in Wisden put it: “There has probably never been a great cricketer who looked less like one than Bowes.

“Standing 6ft 4in, he was clumsily built and a poor mover. Wearing strong spectacles, he looked far more like a university professor, and indeed batted and fielded like one.”

So ungainly and unathletic was Bowes’s fielding - and so important was he to Yorkshire’s cause in the 1930s - he was instructed not to bend or run unnecessarily in the field, even being reprimanded one time by the Yorkshire committee for chasing a ball to the boundary.

Such an order now would be preposterous, of course, when players - including quicker bowlers - are expected to be athletes.

Bowes did not conform to the archetypal image of the aggressive pace man, the cricket writer David Frith referencing his “scholarly terror”. His run-up was slow and lumbering too, another writer, Dudley Carew, observing that Bowes ambled to the crease “like a cart-horse indignant at being prodded out of its normal stride”.

It was perhaps not difficult to discern, therefore, why Bowes – the subject of a fine new biography by Jeremy Lonsdale, An Unusual Celebrity: The Many Cricketing Lives of Bill Bowes – was so beloved of the crowds of his day.

His appeal surely lay in his strange mixture of studiousness and menace, aggression which often saw him criticised for his use of the short ball.

Bowes maintained that he never set out to injure a batsman, and he was hardly of the same terrifying pace as Harold Larwood, his team-mate in the 1932-33 Bodyline series. But he was never afraid to rough up the best of them - including, famously, Jack Hobbs in a county match at the Oval in 1932 - and he admired Douglas Jardine, the former England captain and Bodyline architect, to whom he inscribed a copy of his 1949 autobiography Express Deliveries with the words: “To my friend and greatest of captains - DRJ.”

Bowes’s greatest cricketing friendship - perhaps the greatest of his life - was with Hedley Verity, his Yorkshire and England team-mate, with whom he shared the traits of modesty, soft spokenness and an inquisitive nature.

It was a friendship tragically ended by the Second World War, with the most moving passages of Lonsdale’s book covering Bowes’s three years as a prisoner of war after he was captured at Tobruk in 1942.

Like Verity, who was killed in action the following year, Bowes helped his fellow comrades through their own ordeals by maintaining a positive, cheerful outlook.

According to Esme, his wife, Bowes lost around four stones in weight during this time, yet he was back playing cricket just a few weeks after returning to Yorkshire.

There is no more touching passage in Bowes’s own book than when he chanced to hear about Verity’s death from a Canadian airman, who’d been shot down over Naples before being sent to the same Chieti camp where Bowes was captive.

“Say, there was some cricketer guy at Caserta,” said the airman innocently, before remembering that the man’s surname was Verity.

“Do you mean Hedley Verity was in hospital at Caserta?” asked Bowes.

“Yeah, that’s the fellow,” said the airman. “But he’s not in hospital now. He was buried yesterday. He must have been some important guy. The Italians gave him full military honours.”

Bowes remembered staggering out into the deserted roadway that ran through the camp.

“The wind was cold but I did not notice it,” he wrote. “For a long while I walked up and down that road, time stilled, living again the many incidents and hours we had shared together.”

Bowes and Verity; Verity and Bowes.

They were the engine room of Yorkshire’s success in the 1930s, a decade that brought seven County Championship titles, their combination of pace and spin intoxicating.

Between them, they shared 51 per cent of the club’s wickets during those years, and they endlessly discussed and dissected the game, their deep-thinking tendencies cementing their friendship.

After cricket, Bowes - born in Elland, near Halifax, in 1908, the son of a railway superintendent - coached and mentored the Yorkshire colts, including Fred Trueman. He moved full-time into journalism, writing for the Yorkshire Evening News and the Yorkshire Evening Post.

Bowes became great friends with Jim Kilburn, formerly of this parish, the pair sitting side by side in press boxes and travelling the country together.

When he died in 1987, aged 79, having for many years lived in Menston, near Bradford, Bowes was described in these pages as having been blessed with “universal popularity”, a “large yet infinitely gentle man”, whose “stubborn streak was smoothed by a softly spoken, considerate manner”.

As for his magic, Lonsdale relates that his interest began at the age of 19 during a wet day in the Lord’s dressing room, when he was fascinated by a display of conjuring given by Arthur Cuthbertson, a Minor Counties player.

Thereafter, whenever the Yorkshire side were invited to shows on their trips around the country, Bowes would badger any magicians on the bill to show him their tricks.

“Often, on rainy days, the boys asked me to go through my repertoire of deception,” he wrote, “and at winter cricket dinners I found that my tricks provided a good excuse for not making a speech.”

Bowes was elected to the Magic Circle in 1949 on the same day as the comedian/magician Tommy Cooper. It was a pastime that gave Bowes many years of pleasure.

As he recollected in Express Deliveries: “I have had countless hours of enjoyment engaged in the art of sawing women in two, turning sugar into sand and milk into beer, reading minds or transferring thoughts, and causing the strange disappearance of people, cabinets and even such bulky items as motor cars.

“Perhaps my greatest pleasure in this fascinating hobby has been in mystifying my own family at Christmas, and eliciting convincing replies from Santa down the chimney.”

A man with the magic touch, on and off the field. An unusual celebrity indeed.

* An Unusual Celebrity: The Many Cricketing Lives of Bill Bowes by Jeremy Lonsdale is published by Pitch, priced £25.

Another Pitch offering comes from the pen of David Griffin, the Derbyshire CCC official photographer.

The Jewel in Derbyshire’s Crown: A History of Cricket in Queen’s Park, Chesterfield, priced £19.99, charts the history of cricket played for over 125 years at that beautiful venue.

There is plenty of Yorkshire interest, as well as recollections from several former players, including Sir Geoffrey Boycott.

Boycott played his first match there in 1962, on his third first-class appearance, scoring 47 and 30 not out.

In his 19 first-class appearances at Queen’s Park, Boycott hit 1,367 first-class runs at 65.09, with three hundreds and nine fifties.

“I could talk forever about Chesterfield because it’s such a pretty ground with a pitch that was always good, although early on it could be tricky against the quicker bowlers,” Boycott relates. “And if you got out early you could go and feed the ducks in the lake. Delightful.

“You also knew that you’d get good support when Yorkshire played there because Chesterfield was closer to places like Sheffield than Headingley.”

Yorkshire remain regular visitors to Chesterfield in T20, their next visit scheduled to take place on Sunday, July 6.