Fred Trueman became the first bowler to reach 300 Test wickets
Fiery Fred Trueman, a genuinely fast bowler from a Yorkshire mining district, was the first player to take 300 wickets in Test cricket. He might have taken more, but his running battles with a cricket establishment he found snobbish and hypocritical kept him out of many England sides.
Born on 6 February 1931 near Maltby in the West Riding, he claimed to have weighed 14 lb 1 oz at birth, and his grandmother, who delivered him, supplied his middle name, Sewards. He was the middle child of seven; his father worked mostly with horses and spent a spell at the coalface of the nearby colliery. Trueman began bowling at four, encouraged by his father, who captained the village club, and turned out for it once at the age of eight.
It nearly ended early. A ball struck him in the groin at secondary school and kept him out for two years, and he left at fourteen to work in a newsagent. His family pushed him back to a village side, Roche Abbey, and in 1947 former Yorkshire player Cyril Turner took him on at Sheffield United, teaching him to grip the ball, swing it both ways and finish his action. Herbert Sutcliffe predicted he would play for Yorkshire before nineteen and England before twenty-one, and a telegram in 1949 called him into the county side.
He earned his Yorkshire cap in 1951, and Wisden named him a Cricketer of the Year in its 1953 edition. With Brian Statham he opened England's bowling for years in one of Test cricket's best-known pairings. He was also a fine close fielder and a handy lower-order batsman with three first-class hundreds. Prime Minister Harold Wilson, a fellow Yorkshireman, teasingly called him the greatest living one.
Retirement made him a broadcaster, notably as a forthright voice on the BBC's Test Match Special. He received the OBE in 1989 and died on 1 July 2006; the ICC Hall of Fame inducted him in 2009, and for England's 1000th Test in 2018 he was picked in the country's greatest Test XI.
Source: Fred Trueman
