Selkirk Cricket Club

One of our members has managed to source an old newspaper article detailing the heroes of Selkirk Cricket Club who fought and died for our country during WW1. Please have a read at the below article in rememberence of heroes not only of Selkirk but the whole of Britain.

And here is a list of all the Heroes who made the great sacrifice for our country, including their rank.

A new series celebrating the great cricketers who have played at Philiphaugh. Many splendid players have trotted out from the pavilion to play here but few have been finer than Keith Miller. Nearly 3,000 test runs at an average of almost 37 and 17o test wickets taken at 23 runs apiece is an impressive enough record but figures alone tell barely half the Keith Miller story.

“Nugget” was once called “the Australian in excelsis” by the great English cricket writer Neville Cardus and more than half a century after he last played test cricket he remains perhaps the most glamorous cricketer to have worn the Baggy Green. More than anything else, Miller was a stylish cricketer who played the game with flair and an insouciant attitude that did not always endear him to his superiors, most notably Don Bradman.

On the 1948 Ashes tour, for instance, the Australians spent a day murdering the Essex bowling, racking up 721 runs. Miller derived no pleasure from this turkey shoot and when it was his turn to bat he stepped away to leg and was bowled first ball. He was not the kind of cricketer who played for his average or padded his statistics with easy runs.

Miller was a fighter pilot during the Second World War and would later tell young players that test cricket was easy. Pressure, he said, “is a Messerschmitt up your arse”. In the late 1940s and 1950s he was the most popular Australian in England and a hero to thousands of English schoolboys. For Miller, victory was not the only thing that mattered. Swashbuckling was important too. (He was also rumoured to have enjoyed an affair with Princess Margaret).

In tandem with Ray Lindwall he formed one of Australia’s greatest new-ball attacks and as a classically elegant batsmen he had the power and range of strokes to turn a game on its head in the space of half an afternoon. Bowling off a short and always unmeasured run he could follow a wicked bouncer with a googly or whatever seemed fun or most likely to catch the batsman out. As a batsman he was equally adept hitting thunderous off-drives and delicate late-cuts.

Though a successful captain for New South Wales he was too free-spirited to ever be trusted with the Australian captaincy. Sometimes he took an unusual approach, telling fielders just to “Scatter” when he could not be troubled setting a field. On another occasion he discovered he was taking the field with 12 players. “Well one of you had better bugger off then” he told his players. He would have made a fine skipper in the Border League…

In 1945, Miller was part of the Australian Services XI that toured the British Isles, marking the resumption of first-class cricket after the war. Though the so-called “Victory Tests” do not have official test match status, this was the year Miller first made his mark, hitting a spectacular 185 at Lords. As part of the tour, the Australians visited Philiphaugh where they played a Scottish XI.

Three years later, during the “Invincibles” tour of 1948, Miller returned to Philiphaugh where he planted a tree alongside one that had been planted in 1945 by the wicket-keeper Stan Sismey. He is pictured here, in the centre of the back row, alongside other members of that Australian party and Selkirk committee men of the time. A great Australian and one of the greatest to have trod the Philiphaugh turf.

Many great cricketers have trod the turf at Philiphaugh but none holds more records, many of which will never be broken, than Wilfred Rhodes.

In his long and storied career, Rhodes played more first-class matches than anyone else (1,110) and took more wickets than any other bowler in the history of cricket. In a career that lasted from 1899 to 1930 4,204 batsmen were defeated by the Yorkshireman’s wily slow left-arm spin. He took his wickets at an average of just 16 and claimed ten scalps in a match 68 times. In addition he scored almost 40,000 dogged first class runs and batted in every position from 1 to 11 in the England line-up. When he played his final test, in 1930, he was 52 years old and he remains the oldest man to have ever played in a test match. He bowled at Grace and he bowled at Bradman and every great batsman in between.

Rhodes was never the biggest spinner of the ball but his command of flight was exemplary and few are reckoned to have ever surpassed his mastery of that part of the spinners’ arsenal. His accuracy was so nagging that the wonderful Australian batsman Victor Trumper was said to have once cried out in exasperation “For God’s sake Wilfred, give me some rest!” Neville Cardus, greatest of all English cricket-writers, considered Rhodes “Yorkshire cricket personified”. No small compliment considering Yorkshire have been England’s most successful county.

And it all began in the Border League.

In 1896 and 1897 Rhodes was engaged by our friends and rivals at Gala as their professional to play in the newly established Border League. He made his debut against Selkirk on May 9th 1896 and helped Gala win the day. According to the Selkirk historian William Anderson, although “The nice, easy left-handed delivery of Rhodes was greatly  admired” he “only got three wickets and there was nothing to suggest his future distinguished career.”

Nevertheless, by the time the return fixture at Mossilee came around, “a draw in favour of Gala was the result and this gave Gala the league championship.”

The following season Rhodes returned for Gala while Selkirk engaged Owen Firth “a hefty Yorkshireman” from Redcar as our pro. Firth “proved such a success that he even finished with a better average than Rhodes. Few counties in Scotland, however, ever had at the one  time two such fine bowlers as Rhodes of Gala and Firth of Selkirk.”

The matches between Selkirk and Gala that season were epic tussles. In the first, “The Souters continued their good work in the local ‘derby’ at  Galashiels, when before a record crowd for the season the Souters beat  Gala 88 to 68 and this completed Selkirk’s eight matches in succession  which Selkirk not only won, but not one of their opponents had reached  a three-figure score.

“Gala batted first, but none of their batting could make anything of  the bowling of Ingles, Firth and Harvey, and the latter shattered the wickets of Rhodes after he had scored eight runs. Three Gala players  were caught but all the others were clean bowled for a score of only 68 runs. Rhodes, however bowled so well that Selkirk had lost seven wickets before the match was won and they were all out for 88 runs. Rhodes had seven wickets for 41 runs.”

The return fixture: “was a vital one with Gala and there was a record crowd  for a Border club match this season. Selkirk were in first but to the dismay of the Souters the side were all out for only 71 runs, and the famous contingent of stonemasons (T Dickson & Co.), who were always Selkirk’s most enthusiastic supporters, were chewing stems of grass in their excitement.

“Rhodes had played ducks and drakes with the Souters, to the great delight of the Gala spectators. True, he only once hit the wickets and  the other eight were either caught or stumped. Seldom has anything finer been seen at Philiphaugh as when Rhodes caught and bowled McBain in a drive that was going like a rocket to the boundary. Rhodes finished with nine wickets for 32 runs.”

“With Gala batting, sensation after sensation followed. The Gala crack, Jim Mercer, having the best season of his career and expected to get his 1000 runs for the season, was out to a grand catch at the wickets by ‘Bob’ Anderson, off Firth, in the first over. Rhodes was clean  bowled by Firth for four, and Ingles, bowling his fastest, set A.M. Grieve’s wickets all over the shop. Except for W Fairgrieve, who got  12 runs, the others simply made a parade to and from the wicket, and almost before the crowd could realise what had happened the Braw Lads were all out for 37 runs. Firth had eight wickets for 13 and Ingles two for 22. This left the League Championship almost certain for Selkirk.”

Those were the days! As Anderson cheerfully records, “Wilfred Rhodes in his two seasons at Galashiels had played five times against Selkirk, but had only once been on the winning side, but this was no fault of his as he had in five innings scored 100 runs, giving him an average of 20.0, while in bowling he secured 30 wickets at an average of 5.43.”

In 1896 Rhodes took 92 wickets for Gala at an average of 7.2. In 1897
his figures were 351-92-538-77-6.98. He remains, I think, the greatest cricketer to have played in the Border League. To this day, a portrait of him hangs in the Gala pavilion. And rightly so.

Two years later Rhodes, still aged just 22, made his England debut against Australia at Trent Bridge as he built a career that would make him one of the game’s immortals. Even so and even after he mastered all-comers one can reflect with some satisfaction that for all his many other successes he came off second-best in his battles against the Souters.

Previously in this series: Keith Miller. Next week: Rhodes’ great contemporary George Hirst.