Scarborough Festival

The tradition & historical record

The Scarborough Festival is an end of season series of cricket matches featuring Yorkshire County Cricket Club which has been held in Scarborough, on the east coast of Yorkshire, since 1876. The ground, at North Marine Road, sees large crowds of holiday makers watching a mixture of first-class county cricket, one-day fixtures and invitation XIs in the late August/early September sunshine every year. Many of the world's greatest cricketers have played in festival matches over the years. There have been 399 first-class matches at Scarborough, the vast majority of these in the festival and as well as Yorkshire's games against county opposition ad hoc teams under the name of H. D. G. Leveson-Gower, Tom Pearce, Brian Close and Michael Parkinson have entertained touring teams and World XIs on many occasions. A one-day competition, under the names of various sponsors, was played in the seventies, eighties and nineties and featured four counties who would play a knockout semi final and final for the cup. Two of the greatest batsmen in history scored double hundreds during the festival. Jack Hobbs amassed an unbeaten 266 for the Players against the Gentlemen in 1925 while Sir Len Hutton hit 241 in the same fixture in 1953. The prolific Philip Mead of Hampshire scored two double tons, 233 for the MCC against Lord Hawke's XI in 1929 and 223 for the Players against the long suffering Gentlemen in 1911.

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Scarborough Festival is end of season series of cricket matches at Scarborough, Yorkshire, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ¹

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ¹