Bird played first-class cricket for Yorkshire and Leicestershire as a right-handed batsman, but only scored two centuries in 93 appearances.

In February 2014, Yorkshire announced that Bird was to be voted in as the club's president at their Annual General Meeting on 29 March.

Harold Dennis Bird was born at Church Lane, Barnsley, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, on Wednesday, 19 April 1933, but when he was two years old, he moved with his family to New Lodge estate as his house was pulled down in a slum clearance scheme.

However, he faded out of the team, thanks to a combination of loss of form, confidence and a recurrence of his persistent knee injury, playing his last match in 1964.

While the crowd cleared out of the ground in record time, Bird and the players sat down in the centre of the pitch, knowing there was no bomb there.

Bird was also very strict on the definitions of "intimidatory bowling", both from short-pitched deliveries and high full tosses, and made it abundantly clear he would tolerate none of it.

A pitch invasion followed the West Indies' 17-run victory, and number of players and umpires had items of their playing outfits "souvenired" by the crowd.

Although the Saturday of this particular match had mostly pleasant sunshine, Bird and his fellow umpire, David Constant, refused to let play start because of the previous night's rain; parts of the outfield were still too waterlogged, according to the officials.

Angry Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) members scuffled with Constant as he and the team captains returned to the Long Room after their fifth pitch inspection.

[10] This was not the only occasion where Bird had to stop play, despite current sunny conditions, because of previous bad weather: in the 1988 Test at Headingley against the West Indies, an overnight rainstorm caused a blocked drain to overflow with a delayed action: the pitch was fine but the bowler's run-up was slowly flooding from underneath, the water level was oozing up over Curtly Ambrose's bootlaces, and Bird's as well when he went over to investigate, and the umpires had to take the players off while the outfield was cleared of water.

At the beginning of his final Test in 1996, the two teams – India and England – formed a guard of honour as he came out, and he received a standing ovation from the crowd.

[13] That year he also took part in BBC's The Young Ones, in which six celebrities in their seventies and eighties, attempted to overcome some of the problems of ageing, by harking back to the 1970s.

[19] It has subsequently been raised by putting it on a five-foot-high plinth in order to discourage late night revellers hanging inappropriate items on the famous finger.

[2] In August 2014, Bird was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.