A cricketer’s life recovered

Peate’s Memorabilia Unearthed

On the twenty-second day of October in this year of 2025, a wrong of some magnitude was at long last put right. Beneath blue Yorkshire skies, a headstone was emplaced over the mortal remains of Edmund “Ted” Peate. This gesture had been delayed by a century and a quarter, in which time the resting place of one of England’s most gifted bowlers lay unmarked, as if the very earth had forgotten its debt to genius. But now a stone stands—a modest sentinel to memory.

But you know all this, because you have read my previous. Today we mark the sequel: After the ceremony, my friends and I repaired to The White Swan in Yeadon, a public house of warm timber and warmer recollection, where Peate himself had once presided, not as cricketer but as landlord. There, amid the clink of glasses and the murmur of old affection, Mike Gibson—devoted custodian of cricketing relics—produced a splendid illuminated address bestowed upon Peate by the Yeadon club in that very inn 135 years earlier:

Peate took twenty wickets for Yeadon in that summer of 1890 at a cost of 5.50 each. He was honoured with an evening of the kind true cricketers relish: forty club members gathered in fellowship, partaking of an honest repast. He also received a reward of ten shillings, which in those days could buy a good pair of boots and a measure of pride.

With generous spirit, Gibson has agreed to loan the address to the Yorkshire Cricket Museum, where it will be displayed next season. He had other things to show us: a silver-headed cane, elegant and worn; the ball with which Peate did the hat-trick in 1889, its surface still whispering triumph; and a gold medal commemorating Peate’s voyage to Australia in 1881/82, where he bowled beneath unfamiliar skies and returned with stories that would echo in Yorkshire parlours for decades. We gazed upon these heirlooms as children spellbound.

Thus the evening passed, in remembrance and restoration. And in the hearts of all there gathered, Edmund Peate bowled once more.