Magnificent Seven: Yorkshire’s Champions of the Championship Years

By Andrew Collomosse

Publication Date: June 2010

At the start of the 1959 season, Yorkshire had not won an outright County Championship for 13 years, in those days an unthinkable scenario for White Rose players and supporters. By 1969, they had set the record straight in the most emphatic manner, winning seven Championships and lifting the Gillette Cup twice to establish their place in the pantheon of County Cricket’s greatest teams.

The Yorkshire side of the Sixties featured some of the most famous players in the history of the game: Fred Trueman, Brian Close, Raymond Illingworth and Geoffrey Boycott. And alongside them were the men whose deeds guaranteed them a place in White Rose folklore but whose stories have, for the most part, not been told before. Men like Philip Sharpe, slip fielder supreme, wicketkeeper Jim Binks, who made 412 successive first-class appearances, Mel Ryan and Bob Platt, Trueman’s new ball partners, and Richard Hutton, son of Sir Leonard.

They are just some of the players who will feature in Magnificent Seven, the story, in their own words, of the champion cricketers who shaped Yorkshire’s Championship Decade.

Fifteen out of the remaining sixteen players from this incredible team have contributed to Magnificent Seven. They each take a year to discuss in more and players who are sadly no longer with us are also remembered:

Bryan Stott on 1959 and Ronnie Burnet
Doug Padgett on 1960
Mel Ryan & Bob Platt on 1961 and Vic Wilson
Brian Bolus & Mike Cowan on 1962
John Hampshire on 1963 and Tony Nicholson
Jim Binks on 1964
Richard Hutton on 1965
Don Wilson on 1966 and Fred Trueman
Geoff Cope on 967
Ken Taylor on 1968 and Chris Balderstone
Phil Sharpe on 1969

"This is a book that has been waiting to be written for almost half a century."
Derek Hodgson, YCCC website, June 2010
To read the full review click here.

"It was a marvellous time for Yorkshire cricket, a golden era that no county has ever come close to matching in over half a century"
Ray Illingworth

"They were a magnificent group of lads, they really were. On and off the field. A team in the true sense of the word. Totally committed working 100 per cent for one another. Above all, we were all Yorkshiremen, which meant such a lot to everyone."
Brian Close

"Collomosse grew up in awe of the likes of Close, Fred Trueman, Ray Illingworth, John Hampshire, Philip Sharpe and Jimmy Binks. They and the other members of that all-conquering Yorkshire team were his boyhood heroes, their names every bit as magical as Andrew Flintoff or Kevin Pieterson or Stuart Broad might be in the minds of today's generation of cricket-loving youngsters... That Yorkshire team of the 1960s made such an impression as Collomosse grew up he decided to track down the surviving members to bring fresh colour to his own memories and to hear their take on those glorious years."
Review on The Sports Bookshelf May 2010
For full review click here