Percy Holmes
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| Full name | Percy Holmes | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Born |
25 November 1886 Oakes, Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England |
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| Died | 3 September 1971 (aged 84) Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England |
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| Batting style | Right-hand bat | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bowling style | Right-arm medium | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Percy Holmes (25 November 1886 – 3 September 1971) was an English first-class cricketer, who played for Yorkshire and England.
Holmes was born in Oakes, Huddersfield, Yorkshire, England. An opening batsman and a fine fielder, Holmes was a late developer who played only a handful of matches for Yorkshire before World War I, but came to immediate prominence after it with 1,886 runs and five centuries in 1919. He was named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1920.
With Herbert Sutcliffe, Holmes formed for fifteen seasons the most prolific opening partnership in first-class cricket, and 69 times they put on 100 runs or more for the first wicket. Their partnership culminated, in 1932 against Essex at Leyton, in a then-world-record stand of 555, beating the previous Yorkshire (and world) record by Brown and Tunnicliffe in 1898 by just one run. Holmes contributed an unbeaten 224 to the partnership, which remained the world-record first-wicket partnership for 44 years. It is still the highest partnership for any wicket in English domestic cricket, and the fifth-highest ever for any wicket in the world.
According to Neville Cardus, Holmes was a jaunty, restless character who believed cricket should be fun. He tended to score quickly and to play shots, such as cuts and pulls, that "more correct" batsmen such as Sutcliffe rarely used.
Holmes' Test cricket career was limited to just seven matches, largely because Jack Hobbs was a fixture in the England team until Holmes was past forty years of age. He was picked and discarded, like many others, as England chopped and changed its eleven in 1921 in a vain attempt to match the Australian cricket team under Warwick Armstrong; in fact, Holmes was top scorer, with thirty out of 112, in the first innings of the first Test at Trent Bridge, but he scored only eight in the second innings, and the match was over inside two days. He had to wait six years before being picked again, for the 1927–28 tour to South Africa under Rony Stanyforth, where he opened with Sutcliffe in all five Tests, making 302 runs, including four scores of more than fifty and a highest of 88, but finishing with a "pair" in the last Test. His seventh and final Test came ten days after his world record stand, when, at forty-five, he was picked for the Lord's match against India in 1932. He made just 6 and 11.
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