Dennis Brookes

Dennis Brookes (29 October 1915 He attended Kippax Council School, where he was captain of cricket and football. After being spotted playing club cricket as a teenager, he joined Northamptonshire in 1934, making his debut against Yorkshire in 1934, aged 18. The team at that time was very weak. It failed to win a match for four years from May 1935, and ended at the bottom of the County Championship table for each year from 1934 to 1938, seven years in nine, and second bottom the other two times. Brookes quickly became a regular in the county team, but his career was interrupted by the Second World War, in which he served as a sergeant-instructor in the RAF.

His batting really developed, though, after the war and for the next 10 years he was at, or near the top of, the national batting averages. He was unlucky to play in no more than one Test match, the first Test on the 1947–48 tour of the West Indies. His tour ended prematurely after he chipped a finger bone immediately after the first Test.

Brookes died in March 2006, in Northampton, at the age of 90.