Dickie Bird who died this week aged 92 was as his Times Obituary notes the first celebrity cricket Umpire.
Born in Barnsley he played cricket for Yorkshire and Leicestershire but his true vocation was in Umpiring which he began doing in 1970.
His Times Obituary records ‘a devout Methodist he turned down lucrative offers to join Kerry Packer’s break away series and to officiate in during the rebel tours of South Africa in the apartheid era. He was no political firebrand but he regarded both enterprises as undermining the integrity of the game’
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