TWO sporting stars who were war heroes will be remembered in a special way this summer.

Footballer Donald Bell and cricketer Hedley Verity both gave their lives for their country while serving in the Green Howards in, respectively, the First and Second World Wars.

With the help of the regimental museum in Richmond, North Yorkshire, their lives are to be highlighted in an exhibition called the Greater Game, at the Imperial War Museum North in Salford.

Second Lieutenant Donald Simpson Bell, from Harrogate, is the only professional footballer to have been awarded the Victoria Cross. He played from Bradford Park Avenue in peacetime.

He was killed in July 1916 while attacking a machine gun nest on the Somme.

Five days earlier, he had won the VC after attacking a German position while shooting a revolver in his right hand and lobbing grenades with his left.

The Richmond museum is lending his VC and the bullet-holed helmet he was wearing when he died, to the exhibition.

Cricket legend Hedley Verity died in Italy in July 1943 while serving with the Green Howards, and the museum is loaning one of his MCC touring caps and a Yorkshire cap to the exhibition.

Verity is still in the cricketing record books as the only man to have taken ten wickets for ten runs in first-class cricket.

In the last game he played, before the war started, he took seven wickets for nine runs.

He played for England in 40 Test matches, and holds the record for taking 14 Test wickets in one day, in the Ashes victory of 1934. During the war he worked first in the former Green Howards Depot, in Richmond - where Captain Herbert Sutcliffe, Lieutenant Norman Yardley and Sergeant Leonard Hutton also spent some time.

Captain Verity was shot in the chest while leading his men in a charge against the Germans, near Cantania, in eastern Sicily.

Later, in a military hospital, he is said to have told his batman: "I think I have played my last innings for Yorkshire."

The curator of the Richmond museum, Major Roger Chapman, said: "Both these men have an honoured place in our regimental history - and the Green Howards continues to produce fine sportsmen in a wide variety of activities."