Extract from

NO COWARD SOUL

First Published in The Times in January

Bob Appleyard did not establish his place in the Yorkshire side till 1951 when he was 27 years old. Yet in his first summer, despite missing ten days in early July with a mysterious chest infection, he reached the final day of the season at Scarborough with 197 wickets. In this first extract from ‘No Coward Soul – The Remarkable Story of Bob Appleyard’, by Stephen Chalke and Derek Hodgson, the events of that day are recalled.

“It was a fine, warm day, and Bill Edrich was not out overnight. As we took the field, Leonard said to me, ‘The third ball of the over, bowl it a foot outside his off stump, fairly well up.’ – which I did. Len positioned himself at long on, in front of the scoreboard, and the ball went straight down his throat. I don’t think he’d to move a yard. There aren’t too many occasions when you put a man in a certain place, and the ball goes down his throat like that. It was definitely Len’s wicket. He knew Bill. He knew his style.”

That brought Bob to 198 but, as Jim Kilburn wrote in the Yorkshire Post, ‘though he bowled nearly all morning and most of the afternoon, no other success came his way before tea.’

All eyes, all hopes, were on the newcomer from Bradford – “They seemed more concerned about it than I was.” – but among the spectators, there was a gathering fear of disappointment.

‘His run-up was a dark and curving pathway across the green, his leg-trap crouched in co-operation and occasionally the bat was beaten but when wickets fell they fell to other bowlers.’

“200 wickets. Why should it mean so much more than 199 or 198? At one point I asked Norman Yardley to take me off. ‘It’s spoiling the game, skipper,’ I said. And he just smiled. ‘Keep going,’ he said.”

‘Eventually MCC had only two wickets left, and Appleyard needed both of them.’ At the end of a long, long summer he had bowled 45 overs in the innings, nearly 40 of them in this one day. “I really was tired then. I was on my knees.”

“It was an amazing feat,” his team-mate Ted Lester says. “He bowled virtually the whole day. And it all came down to the last two wickets. I remember thinking at the time, ‘I hope nobody hits a catch to me.’”

Finally there came the joyous ending. He went back to his mark and ran in for his 46th over of the innings, his 79th of the match, his 420th of the last four weeks, his 1,323rd of the season.

‘With excitement high, he had Hall caught by Yardley at mid-on off the first ball, and Tattersall, a left-hander, caught at mid-on by Trueman off the fifth. Both fieldsmen showed obvious relief, Yardley fanning his face with his cap.’

“We all trooped off,” Ted Lester says, “with a great sense of relief.”

It was all over. Bob Appleyard of Bradford had become the only man in the history of cricket to take 200 wickets in his first full summer. They had all been for Yorkshire, too, unlike Hedley Verity, whose 200s had all included England wickets. These things mattered in Yorkshire and, when he sat down in the dressing room, he received from Bill Bowes the highest compliment the great bowler could give the young man.

“Well, you’ve done something Hedley never did.”

There were no television cameras to be faced, no champagne for the teetotaller to drink. He climbed into his second-hand Jaguar with his wife Connie, and they made their way home to Bradford.

“We stopped to eat between Tadcaster and York. Not dinner in the strict sense of the word. Just refreshment. It might have been beans on toast.”

And had they set some time aside for a holiday at the end of it all?

“No, that was the holiday. We’d been to the Scarborough Festival.”

The national averages spelled out the detail of his summer’s work.

                          Overs    Maidens   Runs      Wickets     Average     

R. Appleyard     1323.2     391        2829          200        14.14

J.B. Statham      714.2       178        1466          97          15.11

A.V. Bedser      1100        338        2024          130        15.56

J. McConnon     862.4       238        2186          136        16.07

J.J. Warr            449.2       119        1011          59          17.13  

That winter Bob set about improving his fitness, spending every weekend at Halifax Golf Club. Set on Ogden Moor, with two streams running through it, it is a testing course, with undulating hills that rise steeply from the clubhouse and spongy turf that makes climbing hard work. Nothing but open moor separates the course from Haworth and Bronte country to the North, while on a clear day you can see from the high 13th green all the way to Meltham and the Peak District. The curlews circle overhead, and the mill chimneys of the industrial towns seem but distant specks in the valleys below.

“I often played two rounds on a Saturday and two on a Sunday, all through the winter, on my own sometimes. One of the holes is twelve hundred feet above sea level, and it can be pretty wild and windy. Sometimes, I remember, I was playing in the snow.”

The windswept figure high on the moor was determined to maintain, even to improve on, the standard he had set in his first summer of county cricket. But, alas, he was fighting a losing battle, a battle with an undiagnosed tubercular hole that was spreading in his left lung.

“I thought I wasn’t fit. I was trying to build up my stamina and strength, but I was always feeling tired.”

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