Published 18 October 2021.

​

As cricket’s Edwardian Golden Age slips further into the mists of the past, fewer of its players and deeds are easily recalled. Only 30 years ago there had been no Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan, Brian Lara, Jacques Kallis or Sachin Tendulkar to obscure our view of Fry and Ranjitsinhji or Hirst and Rhodes. These four, along with selected others such as Syd Barnes have stood the test of time. Somehow there is still redolence in what they did and how they did it. 

 

The particular appeal of Wilfred Rhodes resides somewhere in the astonishing, and unsurpassed, longevity and statistics of his career in conjunction with the switches in speciality from bowler to batsman and back again. His skill is a prerequisite to these achievements. There is also the side dish of what he said, very often what he supposedly said, and how this was symptomatic of him as a man. Every bit as much as Brian Close or Fred Trueman he was the archetypal Yorkshireman, that at least is the impression passed down. It is slightly more complicated than that; tales and anecdotes have received embellishments as the decades pass. 

 

Wilfred Rhodes has been the subject of one-and-a-half biographies, both published over 60 years ago. As a combination, the writings of Sidney Rogerson and AA Thomson are invaluable. The former with an imaginative attention to detail, the latter less concerned by minutiae but wielding a pen hot with inventiveness and passion. But 60 years is a long time. Rhodes himself lived for 23 of the 60 and many articles and appraisals have been written since his death. There is also the internet, offering capacities of research only available this century.

 

The historian Adrian Gregory has written that ‘the challenge of very modern history is striking a balance between the familiarity and the strangeness of the recent past’. Buried somewhere in this balance, or perhaps acting as its fulcrum, is the relationship between ‘very modern history’ and the world today. How, for example, would a sportsperson of 100 years ago measure up on the field now? In what way did life differ for the players a century ago. What new challenges have appeared and which have been largely negated? To even get close to answering these questions there is another balancing act to undertake. How did contemporaries perceive the performer at the actual moment of performance, and how far has that perception now altered? Without extensively drawing on writing from the first three decades of the twentieth century, Rhodes becomes something of a shadowy figure, defying any real estimation of who he really was and what he did. Hence I’ve made free with the thoughts of those watching cricket from 1898-1930.

 

Rhodes has a special, and unique place in cricket history. On first-class debut he faced WG Grace, in his last match Don Bradman was on the opposing side. He spanned the late-Victorian era, the Edwardian age, the Great Depression and beyond. In the middle was a four-year hiatus of world war. Society changed vastly during his career and unimaginably during his lifetime. Cricket less so.