Billy Bates
For the American baseball player use Billy Bates (baseball player)Willie Bates, known as
Billy (born
19 November 1855 in
Huddersfield,
Yorkshire, died
8 January 1900 in Huddersfield) was an
English all-round cricketer. Excellent with both bat and ball, he scored over 10,000
first-class runs and took more than 870 wickets, although he was not entirely reliable in the field.
Born in
Lascelles Hall,
Huddersfield,
Yorkshire, in
1873 Bates became a
professional in
Rochdale; four years later he made his first-class debut for
Yorkshire, taking 4-69 in
Middlesex's first
innings to begin a ten-year career in the first-class game. He played 15
Test matches for
England between
1881/
82 and
1886/
87, all of them in
Australia.
At
Melbourne in
1882/
83, Bates played a starring role. He scored 55 in England's only innings before taking 7-28 (including a
hat-trick for England) to force
Australia to
follow on, and then claimed 7-74 in the second innings to help his team to the first
innings victory in a Test match. Bates also set several individual Test match records in this game: his hat-trick was the first for England, 7-28 was a world record innings return, no Englishman had previously taken 14 wickets in a game, and no player from any country had previously taken ten or more wickets and scored a half-century in the same match.
In domestic cricket Bates topped 100 first-class wickets only once, in
1881 when he took 121, but he passed 80 on another four occasions. His best bowling of 8-21 came in
1879, for Yorkshire against
Surrey at
The Oval. As a batsman he passed 1,000 runs in five seasons, scoring ten centuries including three in
1884. He made his highest first-class score of 144 not out in
1882 for Under 30 v Over 30 at
Lord's, when he also recorded a miserly second-innings
analysis of 22-15-17-3.
The end of Bates' career came suddenly. On the a non-Test tour of Australia with
GF Vernon's XI in
1887/
88, he was bowling in the nets when he was hit in the eye by a ball hit by a team-mate, and his eyesight was sufficiently impaired that he never again played first-class cricket, though he did appear in
club cricket in the early
1890s, and was able to coach.
His inability to play the first-class game again caused him great unhappiness, however. Depression set in, and at one point he attempted
suicide. At the end of December
1899 he caught a cold whilst attending the funeral of fellow Yorkshire player John Thewlis. His condition quickly worsened, and a few days later he died, aged just 44.
His son
William Bates had a long first-class career for Yorkshire and
Glamorgan.
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CricketArchive page on Billy Bates
