Feversham League: Runfest, records and royals

Mike Amos reflects on the magic of the Feversham Cricket League from quirky grounds to a Royal appearance. He also catches the first game of the 2025 season with nearly 400 runs scored in two hours.

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The Feversham Cricket League is even older than I am, and that’s positively venerable. Founded in 1927 – the first date, at least, on the championship trophy – it undulates agreeably across the North Yorkshire moors around Helmsley and five years ago earned a chapter in my autobiography.

Nothing in sport is more grass-rooted than the Feversham Cricket League” it began, “though quite often the grass may be obscured by sheep muck (or that of the bovine kind).” Nor, added the opening paragraph, may anything be more joyous.

The Feversham, the book continued, was village cricket at its most bucolic, its most boisterous and its most blessed.

Forever loitering on sport’s more improbable extremes, I’d discovered the Feversham around 35 years ago, waxed ecstatically and was honoured in time to become a league vice-president, though the perks remain undiscovered.

Some of the grounds were improbable going on impossible. Spout House, in Bilsdale, sloped like a Grenadier guardsman, had more local rules than a municipal parks and cemeteries department – four runs for hitting Madge’s clothes line – represented perhaps the only flat 22 yards for many a mile around and for long decades had been overseen by former player William Ainsley, landlord of the adjacent Sun Inn.

William rejected suggestions that the ground’s unusual contours gave the home side an advantage.

“It’s t’same for both teams” he’d insist. “If it lands in’t cow clap for one, it lands in’t cow clap for t’other.”

The Darlington and Stockton Times, ever understating, once supposed it “unusual.” Equally unusual, the story that W G Grace was once bowled for a duck by the Farndale blacksmith must be supposed apocryphal.

High Farndale, daffodil country, remains little less vertiginous, yet more inaccessible and until recently had a pavilion that may have been a hen hut and a scoreboard that probably had seen service as a bedstead.

Had the Ancients played cricket in the Feversham League, they could never have believed that the earth wad flat.

Perhaps the least accessible of all was Bransdale, eight uphill miles from the nearest bus stop, populated in high summer by about two dozen people and two million horse flies or clegs, as up there they’re known.

Roope at Rievaulx

Former England batsman Graham Roope once played for Rievaulx, in the shadow of that great abbey, though apparently with little distinction. “He wasn’t as good as’t local lads and even worse at getting his hand in his pocket” veteran player and official Frank Flintoff once observed.

If Roope’s appearance were improbable, Prince Harry twice pitching up at Spout was the stuff of royal legend, though it appeared little to faze William Ainsley.

Staying as a guest of the Lord and Lady Mexborough at nearby Hawnby, the man who later became the voluntarily exiled Duke of Sussex was guesting for the house team and, so the story goes, got the beers in afterwards.

Someone told William that His Royal Highness Prince Harry was in the bar. “Oh” said William, “does he play for Spout as well?”

Latterly, alas, the league has struggled for members, as few as three around Covid and these days back up to five – High Farndale, Lockton, Slingsby, Glaisdale and Gillamoor, above Kirbymoorside and pronounced locally to rhyme pretty much with Wilma, she who married Fred Flintstone.

The season tends to start late and finish early, harvest to bring home, league games fitted around a couple of cup competitions to which sides from other leagues are invited. The league’s survival appears oft uncertain, but for village cricket lovers seems utterly essential.

Another season began – some say the Feversham’s 98th summer, others the 99th , nervous nineties no matter – on Friday May 9, Glaisdale v High Farndale.

Lockton, also due to be in action that evening, have been unable to raise a team but insist that they’d be fine once everyone’s ended their hibernation.

Glaisdale’s ground is near the Middlesbrough to Whitby railway line, in Feversham terms members of the Flat Earth Society.

Generously funded, they also have a new pavilion, though inside there’s still an old photograph of a village side full of Heartbeating names like Ventress, Tordoff and Harland in which Sir Leonard Hutton sits, blazered and beaming, in the front row.

High scores at High Farndale

Beneath it an elderly, single column, cutting may explain what the Great Man was doing there but it’s much too faded for my enfeebled eyesight.

High Farndale bat first, skipper Richard Smith joined by the locally legendary Brian Leckenby, now 53 but still a formidable flayer.

After 14 of the allotted 18 overs it’s 135-0, long-serving league secretary Charles Allenby, also in attendance, asked the record for the league’s highest opening partnership. “About 185” he supposes, and in an evening league that tends towards being bowler friendly – not just sheep shit to blame – close to the highest team score, too.

They close on 199-0, Leckenby 132, the total subject to rescrutiny – as the football pools folk used to say – because no one can quite decide if a boundary from a no-ball counts four or five.

“Mek it 199” says someone. “Sounds a bit less daunting.”

Glaisdale have been gallant, though increasingly urging “catch it” of any shot which rises more than three inches from the ground or is within 20 yards of a fielder. Nor is there any audible bad language.

In Feversham country, sledging’s what takes place in winter, not on a sun-blessed if sightly parched Spring evening.

It’s also noticeable that, though there’ve been countless sixes into the undergrowth beyond, there’s not been a lost ball. “Aye” says one of the Glaisdale lads, “but just wait till the bugger rains.”

As if in tribute to the centenarian, a passing train on the Esk Valley line sounds a monotone salute, all very well but not the same as when diesel multiple units could play Ilkley Moor and possibly, if asked nicely, the national anthem, too.

Ken Thwaites, another local league legend – Normanby Hall in the NYSD, chiefly – leans languidly against the roller and recalls from the top of his head that the highest opening stand in the English first class game was the 555-0 amassed by Holmes and Sutcliffe against Essex at Leyton.

Not to be outdone, his mate Richard Scruton, more of a table tennis man, adds that the second highest fell just one short, Brown and Tunnicliffe against Chesterfield at Derbyshire.

They wouldn’t have known, they concur, had not both innings been for Yorkshire.

Leckenby, ever affable, appears to be limping a bit. “Old age” he says, but it’s his 75th century and he’s played on 153 different grounds – maybe another record. “If I play until 2050 I might get 100 100s” he supposes.

League records show that in most seasons the highest scorer has failed to reach three figures, the highest the undefeated 146 by S. Dodsworth of Harome in 2003.

Brian Leckenby has already lifted the trophy five times. “I think we can engrave this year’s already” says Charles. Glaisdale appear little daunted, 90 before the first wicket – the first of the game – falls at 8.27pm.

Another record, very likely. Charlie Parker, known thereabouts as Chip, is joined by Jim Allanson, who answers to Jiggy.

For the lads semi-recumbent on the roller, Parker’s name rings bells, a chime echoed by the Gloucestershire cricket website. “Charlie Parker was the son of a general labourer, an admirer of the Russian revolution and a gut radical” it says.

He couldn’t half bowl, though, more than 100 first class wickets in every season from 1920-35 and more than 200 in 1925.

Chip, perhaps off the old block, brings up his own century with a six off the penultimate ball. The hosts finish ten short, still just one down. Nearly 400 runs smitten in a little over two hours.

Ever anxious for more clubs, eternally appealing, the Feversham League’s confident of reaching its own century. More vice-presidential papers may follow.

Read more by Mike Amos

*Called Unconsidered trifles, Mike Amos’s autobiography embraces 50 years in North-East regional journalism, almost entirely with The Northern Echo.

Details of that and more of his books from [email protected].

His blog, Grass Routes, is well worth a look too – with a combination of grassroots football and some cricket features.