Holmes and Sutcliffe

It is said that they first met on the upper deck of a Leeds tramcar, travelling to nets at Headingley in one of the last years before the First World War. They spotted each other’s cricket bags, and they fell into conversation. Percy Holmes was the older by eight years, on the verge of breaking into the Yorkshire eleven, but in time it would be Herbert Sutcliffe, through his achievements in Test cricket and his greater social bearing, who would become the senior partner.

Both had humble beginnings. Sutcliffe, born near Harrogate and orphaned early, grew up with strict Congregationalist aunts above a bakery in Pudsey, while Holmes, a worsted weaver’s son, spent his childhood on the outskirts of Huddersfield. Both left school at 13, Sutcliffe to work as an apprentice boot-maker, Holmes to be a mill worker.

War delayed their coming together for Yorkshire. Holmes spent the four years working in factories; Sutcliffe, already making his way in the world, ended it as a Second Lieutenant in the Green Howards.

By June 1919 they were opening the innings for Yorkshire, and in their early forays together there was a rivalry within their partnership, as Herbert Sutcliffe’s account of their first great stand makes clear.

They were at Northampton in late July. Holmes was at the non-striker’s end, two runs short of his second century for Yorkshire, while Sutcliffe prepared to face the bowling. He was the junior partner, yet to make his maiden hundred, and he was on 94.

George Hirst, who was sitting with the remainder of our fellows on the pavilion, said, “He ought to hit a six now.” I went out to the next ball, got properly hold of it, and it soared over long-off to clear the boundary by about forty yards and pitch into the tennis courts. Probably one of the biggest hits I have made.

The thrill stayed with me for a long time – there is a touch of it now when I think of the shot – but the hit was one I would never have attempted had there not been the race with Percy for the hundred. If he had not been so near his hundred, I should never have taken the risk.

A fortnight later they both hit centuries in the Roses match. Then the following summer, while the younger Sutcliffe was still perfecting his game, Holmes became the first man to hit a century in each innings of a Roses match; he also hit a triple hundred at Portsmouth. Only three men in England scored more runs than him that summer. Yet, to the surprise of most, he was not selected to tour Australia.

The Australians came to England the following year, and this time he was called up – for the first Test at Trent Bridge – but his batting in the match caused his Test career to be mysteriously and permanently blighted.

England were dismissed on a damp pitch for 112, victims of the fast bowling of Gregory and McDonald, and Percy Holmes top-scored with 30. Amid the falling wickets, his batting was described by The Times as ‘quite comfortable’ while the former England captain Archie MacLaren thought he was one of only two ‘to give one any confidence. … He showed no trace of nervousness … and deserves praise for the dogged manner in which he stuck to his task, for he dealt successfully with many awkward rising balls. … He would have stayed longer had he not tried to force things after the rain.’

It was a gutsy innings and years later, back in Huddersfield, Arthur Hutchinson, son of Holmes’ solicitor, was told about it by his father. “Down Percy’s left-hand side, you couldn’t have put a half crown on an area where the flesh wasn’t bruised.”

Unfortunately the man who mattered most, chairman of selectors Harry Foster, saw the innings in a different light. He thought that he spotted Holmes edging slightly to leg when McDonald bowled, and his reaction was immediate. “So long as I have influence in choosing England,” he told his companion, “that man never bats in another Test.”

After that, for all his later runs for Yorkshire, Percy Holmes was forever in the shadow of his partner Herbert Sutcliffe.

It was Sutcliffe in Australia in 1924/25 who – with 734 – set a new record for runs in a Test series. It was Sutcliffe who – at The Oval with Hobbs – won back the Ashes in 1926. And it was Sutcliffe who – on a Melbourne ‘sticky dog’ in February 1929 – hit the masterly 135 that made sure the Ashes were retained.

That day at The Oval the crowd gathered in front of the pavilion. “We want Hobbs,” they chanted. “We want Sutcliffe.” Herbert was a hero throughout the land – and, while the cheers rang out, Percy sat in the pavilion at Harrogate, watching the rain fall on his county match.

There were many who watched the two of them who considered Holmes to be the one blessed with the greater natural talent. He played with a straight bat, which gave him a solid defence, but he also had a lightness on his feet – as he had a lightness of humour – and that allowed him to express himself with shots all round the wicket. Cardus wrote of his being ‘versatile and impulsive, always alive by instinct, intent on enjoyment on the cricket field or off it’ – while Len Hutton called him ‘the quickest chap on his feet I ever saw.’

‘There was a daintiness about all his cricket,’ Bill Bowes wrote. ‘He should have been a ballet dancer. His dainty heel-toe walk gave him the appearance of bouncing over the ground. A century by Holmes was an experience to remember for life.’

Sutcliffe, by contrast, was a man who never did anything without first working out its consequences. ‘He was not born to greatness,’ Cardus wrote. ‘He achieved greatness. His wasn’t a triumph of skill only, it was a finer triumph, a triumph of character, application, will-power.’

He scored his runs with well-tried shots: an off-drive, a back-foot push behind point and, when he was established in his innings, a fearless hook. ‘Cricket,’ he wrote in a coaching manual, ‘is a game which calls, above everything else, for self-control. More than any other game, it tests the temper of a man, and in the test reveals his character.’

Percy Holmes was a man determined in his own way to succeed. In his early days he would not let himself go to sleep till he had got clear in his mind why he had been dismissed that day – “I used to lie in bed for hours working it out from every angle. Then, when I knew, I slept peacefully” – and at the start of each summer he would be doing five-mile walks over the moors each day before breakfast. “And I used to make a point of drinking a pint of pure olive oil each week, to loosen up my muscles.”

But he did not have that extra single-mindedness that set Herbert Sutcliffe apart from his fellow professionals. Len Hutton thought Sutcliffe had a level of concentration higher than any other player he knew, while to Don Bradman ‘he had the best temperament of any cricketer I ever played with or against.’

Sutcliffe became much more than just a cricketer. He took elocution lessons and acquired the vowels of the amateurs, he ran a sports outfitters business and became wealthy, and he carried himself at all times as a figure of great standing. A.A. Thomson called him ‘the merchant prince of cricket: a man both polished and powerful, one who not only possesses a regal quality but has it on a sound commercial basis.’

Percy Holmes, though, did not strive for anything beyond his cricket. In the words of Arthur Hutchinson, the son of Percy’s solicitor, ‘he was a bubbly, jovial man, an eternal optimist. He seemed to ride any problems in a carefree manner. And he was happy to live a modest life, with no particular aspirations. As long as he’d got enough money for his little house and his pint of mild, he was content.’

Holmes lived with his wife and children in an ordinary house in Colwyn Street in Huddersfield, with a back garden he enjoyed. Sutcliffe, by contrast, bought a grand mill-owner’s house, set in several acres of land, high on the hill above Pudsey. He had a tennis court, an orchard and a stable block.

“Everything had to be done to the highest standard,” his daughter Barbara recalls. “He dressed immaculately, and he didn’t like anything out of place. He bred pedigree boxer dogs, and he often sat with them in the evening in his office, doing his books for the shop, all in his beautiful handwriting.”

He never wasted time. When he was out, he would not play cards or engage in idle chatter. He would shower and rub down, then get out his writing case and work, oblivious to the comings and goings around him. Only when he had finished, Bill Bowes reckoned, would he look up and ask, “How are we doing?”

Bill Bowes went on:

He made a habit of not smoking before lunch and would occasionally go for a long spell, even a month, without a cigarette or a drink. “I like to keep a mastery of these things,” he would say. Had he wished, he could have mastered lions. He certainly mastered the art of batsmanship, and he mastered bowlers.

Percy Holmes, too, liked to be the master when he batted – but not in the same way. Where Sutcliffe had an unruffled grandeur, Holmes had a perky impishness. The Glamorgan captain Maurice Turnbull took up position at a very silly mid-on to him one day, and Percy in later life liked to tell how he dealt with him:

“Now then, Mister Turnbull,” I said. “Do you dare field to me – Percy Holmes – in that position?” And a few minutes afterwards, when he was hopping off the field, he turned back to me, “You were right, Percy. You were right.”

Robertson-Glasgow wrote of Holmes as like ‘an ostler inspired to cricket’, and Cardus picked up on the image, describing him as having ‘a stable-boy air about him; he seemed to brush an innings, comb it, making the appropriate whistling noises.’

There was nothing of the carefree whistler about Herbert Sutcliffe, and sometimes his partner would look down the wicket at him with a wistful envy. “If only I had Herbert’s patience!” he would say.

But, as Bill Bowes put it:

If he had had Herbert’s patience, he wouldn’t have been the same Percy. There was a delightful irresponsibility about his daintiness which, paradoxically, combined well with the academic dourness of his partner. In step or out of step, on the field or off, his undying optimism and ready smile has remained with him throughout the years. If only he had … but then it wouldn’t have been Percy.

Holmes was a popular man in the game, and he was selected for three minor tours in the mid-1920s: two to South Africa, one to the Caribbean.

On his second trip to South Africa, when many of the leading players were absent, he opened in all five Tests with Herbert Sutcliffe and scored four fifties. He also hit an unbeaten 279 at Bloemfontein against the Orange Free State, an innings that saw him presented with the mounted head of a springbok.

In the West Indies, under Lord Tennyson, he suffered from sea sickness and in Georgetown, when Tiger Smith was knocked unconscious by a bat, he put on the wicket-keeping gloves and almost immediately had his nose broken. ‘We both lay there in the pavilion,’ Tiger Smith wrote, ‘feeling sorry for ourselves.’ Four weeks later at Sabina Park in Kingston the two of them had recovered sufficiently to put on 126 for the first wicket and Holmes went on to a double century.

They were happy tours and, along with some winters of coaching in India, they gave him experiences of life far beyond the mills of Huddersfield, but they never quite made up for the disappointment of not touring Australia. He missed out three times in the 1920s, and the third time he expressed his feelings to the Bradford Telegraph and Argus. ‘However well I play,’ he complained, ‘I’m persistently ignored.’

Bob Wyatt, a later England captain, put in print his view that ‘he lacked that mysterious and elusive thing, the Test match temperament.’ But Herbert Sutcliffe, who knew Percy best of all, disagreed completely. ‘He was a great fighter with a real Test match temperament. … It’s hard to understand his continual omission from Test cricket.’

“Never mind, lad,” Percy told one Yorkshire colleague. “I’m happy playing with my own team.”

While the greatness of his partner can be seen in the annals of Test cricket, the finest achievements of Percy Holmes were all for his beloved Yorkshire. And there was no individual achievement finer than his 315 not out against Middlesex at Lord’s in June 1925, an innings that broke the 105-year-old record for the highest score ever made at the home of cricket. The Times compared him readily with ‘the Old Man himself’, Dr W.G. Grace, and Pelham Warner in The Cricketer called the innings ‘a sheer delight’:

The ball hit his pads but once, he was snatching short runs as much towards the end as at the beginning, and he showed that he is one of our greatest and most dependable batsmen.

But it was not as an individual that Percy Holmes left his greatest mark on cricket; it was as one half of ‘Holmes and Sutcliffe’. In all, they shared 74 partnerships of 100 or more, better by 11 than the great Surrey pair Jack Hobbs and Andrew Sandham. And, when it came to the really long stands, they were in a class of their own. On 13 occasions they passed 250, whereas their Surrey rivals managed that milestone just three times. In the whole history of first-class cricket, there has not been another opening partnership as prolific as that of Percy Holmes and Herbert Sutcliffe.

They walked to the wicket together, each in his own way expecting success. To Holmes, the eternal optimist, the bowlers were all ‘chicken feed’, he could ‘murder the lot of them.’ To Sutcliffe, the graver man, it was a matter of concentration. Nobody had the right to get him out. They had self-confidence, and they had confidence in each other.

They ran between the wickets with an understanding not known to many. Other batsmen, who opened with them, soon realised how special their running was. “If he was my regular partner,’ Derbyshire’s Denis Smith said after batting with Sutcliffe in a Festival match, ‘I’d average another 15 runs an innings.’

Holmes and Sutcliffe. They were very different characters, but they were brought together by cricket. And, from that upper deck of a Leeds tramcar to the match at Leyton in 1932, they shared so much.

Two years after Percy Holmes had gone from the Yorkshire side, Herbert Sutcliffe expressed his feelings in his autobiography:

There are times when I miss the presence of Percy in the middle. The link has been broken and there is now only the memory of the past. But what a happy memory it is! When I went out to open an innings with Percy there was always something to talk about on the way to the middle. I had grown up in cricket with him and, because of that, I suppose, I was as deeply interested in his welfare as he was in mine. We always finished our walk to the middle with: “Well, the best of luck, old man.”

Then we went to our ends, Percy to look round the field in that alert and perky way he had before he took the first ball.

Holmes and Sutcliffe. To every Yorkshire supporter, they were a reassuring sight as they emerged from the pavilion.

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