Yorkshire's greatest wicketkeeper 

This article first appeared on the ACS Cricket website on 
30 July 2024, reporter Brian Sanderson.

On a Wednesday afternoon recently I was involved in a cricketing Zoom meeting, and was invited to put together a quiz about the 1968 cricket season. One of my questions was this: Who were the five Wisden Cricketers of that Year ? Perhaps you know that one of them was James Graham Binks, universally known as “Jimmy.”

Binks was born in Hull on October 5, 1935, his father was a wicketkeeper, and the genes carried forward. Binks junior started out as Roy Booth’s understudy, but in 1955 Booth moved to Worcestershire. In his first season Binks was on a match-to-match contract (typical of Yorkshire at the time), and it was not until four weeks into the 1957 season that he became a full-timer. In 1960 he established a new record for Yorkshire, with 108 dismissals over the season (97 of them caught), but it was not until 1964 he was invited to join an MCC tour.
In Pakistan, as a replacement for John Murray, he featured in two Tests, and in one of them opened the batting when there were some injuries. In 1965 he hit his highest score, 95 against Middlesex at Lord’s, and in 1967 his benefit brought him £5,351. At the end of the 1968 season he had reached 1,000 victims after 13½ years of almost uninterrupted cricket.
Bill Bowes once spoke in a Wisden tribute to how much Jimmy Binks was loved in Yorkshire. This week, as it happens, I was able to purchase four press photographs of the great wicketkeeper. I never saw him play, but from what I have read he would be in my all-time Yorkshire XI. He is still alive, aged eighty-eight, living in America.
For full details of his playing record & stats, check out Jimmy's profile on the cricinfo website.
Jimmy Binks Profile - Cricket Player England | Stats, Records, Video (espncricinfo.com)

For the record, the other four Wisden players of that year were Barry Richards, David Green, Oswald Wheatley and Derek Underwood.