ENGLAND’S cricketers slumped to an embarrassing defeat last weekend in the first Ashes Test against Australia, beaten inside two days for the first time since 1921.
In the 1920s, cricket was enjoying a “golden age” of immense popularity, and for many people in those pre-wireless days, it was only newspapers, like The Northern Echo, that provided details of the matches.
Even though England had been drubbed 5-0 in the Ashes held down under in 1920-21, there was great anticipation when the summer series started at Trent Bridge in Nottingham on Saturday, May 28, 1921. It was England’s 100th Test, and the Echo’s front page previewed the match with a large picture of the Aussie team and an in-depth weather analysis.
The first day’s play, said the Echo, was “characterised by a succession of thrills and disappointments”, which is a good description of the play in Perth last weekend, as well.
England batted first and were soon in trouble, due to “the deadly work of Gregory, the Colonial fast bowler,” said the Echo.
“In four balls, he dismissed three of England’s crack batsman and thus broke the back of his opponent’s batting strength. The total at the time stood at 18 and from that disaster the Englishmen never recovered and the whole side was dismissed for only 112.”
Only the Yorkshire batsman Percy Holmes, making his Test debut, received any praise from the Echo’s reporter as he made 30 runs.
But the Australians finished the first day on 167 for six, already 45 ahead.
In the 1920s, Test matches were only scheduled to last three days with Sunday being a rest day.
Still, the Echo led its front page on the Monday with a long report and main picture of Saturday’s humiliating play.
But the second day’s play was even worse, with England bowled out for 147 and the Aussies knocking off the 30 they needed to win by 10 wickets in a Test so short that its like would not be seen until 104 years later last weekend.
“We may as well face facts,” said the Echo’s front page report. “We have been consoling ourselves long enough with false hopes. Our Australian cricket challengers are too good for us. Every phase of the first Test match has proved that chosen on present lines, the English team was not good enough. It was palpably weak in batting, very good in fielding, excellent in bowling, but on the whole inferior as a force to the men from the Antipodes.”
The correspondent was only sympathetic towards George Tyldesley, a Lancastrian batsman making his debut and facing the Aussie quick, Jack Gregory.
“Tyldesley received a ball from Gregory on the temple, and fell doubled up, evidently in real pain, and as he did so the ball passed on and broke his wicket,” said the Echo. “The batsman was so badly hurt that he had to be assisted off the field.
“The unfortunate Lancastrian has ample reason to remember his first Test match. To be bowled first ball in his first innings was bad enough, but to be bowled off his face and to be made ready for hospital in his second attempt was a double tragedy.”
The Echo was very critical of England’s selectors who, for the second Test, dropped both Holmes and Tyldesley. In fact, they used 30 players in the five match series, a record which still stands today.
And England lost 3-0, with the last two matches being drawn due to the weather.
Holmes wasn’t picked again for another six years by which time he was 41. Tyldesley was recalled sooner and was a member of the England team which won the Ashes in 1926. He is still Lancashire’s highest ever run scorer and is great-great-nephew is Michael Vaughan, the former Yorkshire and England captain, who was commentating on Test Match Special as Ben Stokes’s England slumped to their historic defeat in the early hours of last Saturday morning.
THIS fabulous picture adorned the front page of The Northern Echo a couple of days before the cricket took over in 1921. It shows a horse standing half in and half out of the Black Swan pub in Darlington’s Parkgate having smashed through a plate glass window.
The poor animal was pulling a lorry when it spooked, ran off and crashed into the pub, throwing one of the men on the lorry through the window. He was badly injured and taken to hospital and the horse, sadly, was so hurt that it had to be put to sleep.
In the picture, the Black Swan’s distinctive tiling can clearly be seen. The tiles were installed in 1897 when the pub’s new owner, William Younger & Co of Edinburgh, installed a new, typically late Victorian frontage on it.
The core of the pub, though, dates back to the late 1770s, when it was a residence called Park House. The house was on the boundary of the Bishop of Durham's two parks: Low Park, on the River Skerne's floodplain, and High Park, where he chased his deer, which was above on Bank Top.
By 1825, when the Stockton and Darlington Railway opened, Park House had become the Black Swan.
The Croft branchline of the railway – now the course of the East Coast Main Line – ran within 100 yards of its door and so the Swan has perhaps a unique place in railway history.
From October 16, 1826, a horsedrawn stagecoach called The Union was pulled so regularly along the railway between Darlington and Stockton that an advert promoting it in the Durham Advertiser newspaper is regarded – by some, at least – as the world's first railway passenger timetable.
“The Union will run from the Black Lion Hotel and New Inn, Stockton, to the New Inn, Yarm, and to the Black Swan Inn, near the Croft Branch, Darlington,” said the timetable. “At each of which inns passengers and parcels are booked, and the times of starting may be ascertained.”
A station was at Bank Top from 1841 so the Swan must always have been intimately involved with railway travellers.
When its new frontage was added in 1897, it was the start of the regeneration of Parkgate. Many of the street’s buildings date from the Edwardian period including, of course, the Hippodrome of 1907.
Perhaps the horse crashing into the pub in 1921 just days before the first Test was an omen: the black swan is the emblem of the state of Western Australia.
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