James Whitehead

Stephen James Whitehead (2 September 1860 – 9 June 1904) was an English cricketer who played first-class cricket for Warwickshire between 1894 and 1900 and for Liverpool and District in 1891 and 1892. He was born in Enfield Highway, Middlesex and died at Small Heath, Birmingham.

Cricket career Whitehead was a right-handed lower-order batsman and a right-arm bowler who could bowl both off-breaks and medium-pace. He played for Warwickshire from 1886, but the county's matches were not regarded as first-class until 1894. Among his non-first-class matches for Warwickshire was the first match at the Bristol County Ground at Ashley Down, Bristol against Gloucestershire in which he ended W. G. Grace's first innings on the new ground by bowling him. His first first-class games were for the Liverpool and District side in 1891 and 1892, in matches against Yorkshire which the Liverpool side won in both years.

From 1894, Warwickshire's games against other first-class sides were also considered to be first-class, though the team did not join the County Championship until 1895. In 1894, Whitehead, alongside Henry Pallett, formed part of an extremely successful bowling line-up, and he took five wickets in an innings five times, on four occasions going on to take 10 or more wickets in a match. He almost equalled that return in the very next game by taking eight Surrey wickets for 49 in the first innings. Whitehead's success brought him selection for one of the representative sides in a non-Test cricket season: he played for A. J. Webbe's XI alongside notables such as Lord Hawke and F. S. Jackson against Cambridge University and took eight wickets in the game. He was, however, unable to sustain this level of performance, though he finished the 1894 season with 73 wickets at the respectable bowling average of 17.17 runs per wicket. The following day, the newspaper reported, a doctor was called and pronounced that Whitehead had "English cholera", now called dysentery; he died the same evening.