THE REMARKABLE cricketing life of Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird came to an end this week aged 92.
He umpired in three World Cup finals and 66 Test Matches, which was a record when he retired, as well as 69 One Day Internationals.
Dickie – a name he was given by friends at Raley Secondary Modern – was born in Church Lane in 1933 before moving to New Lodge.
He had been in the youth teams of his beloved Barnsley FC but a knee injury forced him to focus on cricket, famously forming a top three at Barnsley CC with future England great Geoffrey Boycott and TV chat show host Michael Parkinson with whom he remained lifelong friends.
While Parkinson went into journalism, Bird and Boycott would be professional cricketers – with the latter becoming a firm fixture in the Yorkshire then England set-ups.
Bird’s highlight for Yorkshire was making 181 not out in 1959 against Glamorgan in Bradford, due to an injury to Ken Taylor who was playing for England, but he was dropped the following game as Taylor returned. He moved to Leicestershire in 1960 for whom he played the majority of his 93 First Class matches then left the professional game in 1964.
After a spell as a coach in Devon then South Africa, he moved into umpiring in the 1970s and, within three years, was standing in Test Matces.
There were various high-profile incidents in his first few games.
His fellow umpire Arthur Fagg left the pitch in a game at Edgbaston due to the reaction of West Indies players to one of his decisions, meaning Dickie had to umpire from the bowler’s end at both ends briefly with a substitute at square leg.
A match later in the series was postponed due to an IRA bombscare, with the crowd evacuated, while Dickie sat on the ground in the middle of the pitch confident it was a hoax, which was proved to be the case.
After umpiring the 1975 World Cup final, he was caught up in a pitch invasion in which a West Indies fan pinched his trademark white hat – with Dickie later claiming a bus conductor boasted to him the following day that he had ‘taken Dickie Bird’s hat.’
In 1988, a burst pipe caused water to ooze through the surface at Headingley against West Indies, with Bird taking the players off and telling a frustrated crowd: "I can't help it if there's a burst pipe. There's water coming up. It's not my fault, that." He also famously called off play for an excess of sunlight – thought to be a world first.
He had a reputation for stopping play due to weather and rarely giving players out LBW, but appeared to be universally popular with cricketers around the world including some of the biggest names. Ian Botham called him ‘the best and fairest of them all’ and ‘a great bloke and completely bonkers’.
Dickie put marbles in his pockets which he moved from one to the other to count the six balls of an over, once spilling them onto the Old Trafford pitch when England played West Indies in 1995.
England’s Michael Atherton recalled: “Play was halted momentarily while Dickie scrambled around on his hands and knees looking for his counters. ‘I’ve lost me marbles! I’ve lost me marbles! He cried. Most of us thought he had lost his marbles a long time ago.”
The following year, he oversaw his final Test Match with Atherton organising a guard of honour from both sets of players. Dickie cried but, three balls into the game, gave Atherton out.
His final county game was in 1998 but he remained a famous face in cricket, with his autobiography selling more than a million copies while he also performed a popular one man show.
He was president of Yorkshire in 2014 and was a regular spectator at both Headingley and Oakwell.
