THE Huddersfield thread was magnificently strong through a glorious decade for Yorkshire cricket.

Between 1959 and 1969, the White Rose dominated to the tune of seven County Championship titles and two Gillette Cup successes.

Ken Taylor, who also played Test cricket for England and football for Town, played in all seven winning Championship teams, Mel Ryan and Bob Platt in four.

The late Chris Balderstone also featured, and their story is told in and excellent new hardback called Magnificent Seven (Great Northern Books, £16.99) by well-known freelance journalist Andrew Collomosse.

It’s an engaging, amusing and highly informative read because the players involved tell in their own words of the team’s achievements and the characters who reigned supreme.

Platt and Ryan, who both still live in Huddersfield, tell candidly of how they broke through the ranks to make the Yorkshire line-up and how, as fast bowlers, they operated in tandem with one of the greatest of them all – Fred Trueman.

“It says everything that I didn’t have a wrong word with Fred in 10 years,” recalls his good friend Ryan, who took 413 wickets for the county at 22.92 and now lives in Almondbury.

“Fred, Len Hutton and Bob Appleyard were the three greatest cricketers that I played with.

“Fred always had the best end when we bowled – it was uphill and against the wind for the rest of us!

“And Fred used to rip through the tail. I took 400 first-class wickets and I always say 390 were batsmen one to six.

“I would probably have taken another 100 wickets if I’d been able to bowl at nine, 10 and 11 and from the right end. No question, I would have been more successful if Fred hadn’t been at the other end.”

Inswing bowler Platt, president of the Drakes League and Yorkshire’s cricket chairman when they won the title in 2001, also delighted in Trueman’s company but offers a different slant on the bowling.

“I had only three 10-fors (10 wickets in a match) in my career, against Surrey, Middlesex and Worcester, and Fred played in all three games.

“When I look back at the scorecards, I see I knocked down more early batsmen than Fred did.

“Maybe that was because they were so relieved to get away from Fred that they didn’t mind taking me on. Who knows?”

Platt, capped in 1959, made 96 first-class appearances for Yorkshire and took 282 wickets at 22.65. He is still heavily involved in the family electrical firm at Holmfirth which sponsors the Huddersfield League’s Frank Platt Championship section.

Taylor, who (like Balderstone) had the task of balancing careers in professional football and cricket, scored almost 13,000 runs in 303 first-class outings for Yorkshire (16 centuries) and had 129 wickets, including Sir Garfield Sobers twice in the same match in 1963.

He talks the reader through the 1968 season, when the title was again won and he decided enough was enough.

“I had made my mind up to retire,” he says. “Perhaps, on reflection, I should have carried on for a bit longer, but I wasn’t as interested as I had been, my results were going down and it was no longer quite so much fun to play.

“I suppose it really started to wane for me when Bryan Stott left. I couldn’t understand why he was allowed to leave because he was doing well with the bat and was no slouch in the field.

“But Brian Sellers, the cricket chairman, had this bee in his bonnet that we couldn’t have more than 12 capped players and, at the end of the 1963 season, Geoff Boycott, John Hampshire and Tony Nicholson were all capped. So, according to Sellers, somebody had to go.

“Bryan was enthusiastic and made you want to play and something went out of the game for me when Stotty disappeared.”

Everyone in the book is a Yorkshireman, and there are wonderful contributions from Stott, Doug Padgett, Brian Bolus and Mike Cowan, Hampshire, Jimmy Binks, Richard Hutton, Don Wilson, Geoff Cope and Phil Sharpe.

The foreword and afterword are by two of the greats, Ray Illingworth and Brian Close.

Ryan concludes: “People sometimes ask me if I’d like to be playing today, when there’s so much money kicking around, but I always say no.

“I never got rich playing cricket but I was around at the best possible time. It was the best 10 years of my life. A wonderful experience.”