Dukes Ball Explained: How England's Test Ball Is Made

There is a workshop on a residential street in Walthamstow, in east London, where a small number of people sit at benches and sew cricket balls together with a needle and waxed thread. The balls that come out of it are used in Test matches at Lord's, at Headingley, in Barbados and in Dublin. Nothing about the building suggests that. The company that runs it employs a fraction of the staff of its Australian rival and makes a fraction of the balls, and it still controls the most argued-over object in English cricket.

The Dukes is the reason English seam bowling looks the way it does. A ball with a proud, hand-stitched seam that stays proud, in a country with heavy cloud cover and grassed-up surfaces, produces bowlers who learn to hold a seam upright and wait. Take that ball away and the skill it rewards has nowhere to go, which is exactly what the counties discovered when they were asked to play part of their season with something else.

What follows is the ball itself: where it came from, how it is put together, who decides which one gets used, and why the summer of 2025 turned a piece of stitched leather into a running news story.

Penshurst, 1760

The Duke family began making cricket balls by hand at Redleaf Hill, near Penshurst in Kent, in 1760, and carried on there until 1841. This was a cottage industry in the literal sense — leather, thread and a workshop attached to a house, in a county where the game was already established. Kent was cricket country long before there was an England side to play for, a story picked up in the account of how cricket began in England.

Two early landmarks stand out in the company's own record. In 1775 the Dukes obtained a royal patent for cricket balls. Around the same period they produced what is described as the first six-seam ball, presented to the then Prince of Wales and used in the cricket of 1780. Six rows of stitching along the seam is still the specification for a first-class ball today, from any manufacturer, which makes that a genuinely durable piece of design rather than a curiosity.

Recognition came through the great trade exhibitions of the nineteenth century. A Dukes triple-sewn ball won a prize medal at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and the firm took a gold medal at the Melbourne International Exhibition in 1880 — an odd footnote given that Australia has spent most of the time since rejecting the ball. In 1920 the business merged with John Wisden and Company, the bat maker, which is how a ball brand and an almanack ended up under adjacent letterheads for a while.

How a pension fund manager ended up owning it

The modern history of the Dukes is inseparable from one man. Dilip Jajodia left a job in fund management in the City in the early 1970s and set up a mail-order cricket equipment business, which was an unusual way to sell kit at the time. He moved into ball manufacture in the early 1980s, and in 1987 he bought British Cricket Balls Ltd — and with it the Dukes name — from Gray-Nicolls.

He then moved production. The balls had been made in the Tunbridge Wells area, keeping them roughly in the Kent orbit where they started; Jajodia relocated the operation to Shernhall Street in Walthamstow, which is where the finishing work has been done ever since. The company also supplied the white balls used at the 1999 World Cup in England, the tournament that ended the long era of red-ball-only fifty-over cricket in this country.

Ownership by a single proprietor rather than a corporate group matters to how the Dukes story has played out. When something goes wrong with the ball, there is no communications department. There is Jajodia, who talks to journalists directly and at length, and who has been notably unwilling to accept that the fault lies with his product.

From a Scottish hide to a Test match ball

The Dukes is a four-piece ball: the leather cover is cut into quarters rather than halves, which is the dividing line between a match ball and a training ball everywhere in the game.

The supply chain is longer than most people assume.

• The hide. The preferred raw material is cattle hide, with Aberdeen Angus beasts raised on Scottish and Irish grass regarded as the best source. Thickness and consistency, not appearance, are what the trade is buying.
• The tannery. Hides go to a leather works in Chesterfield, in Derbyshire, where they are cleaned, treated with aluminium sulphate as part of the tanning process, coloured and cut. The alum-tanned English finish is what gives a Dukes its darker, deeper red compared with a machine-made ball.
• The grading. The dried hide is measured for thickness. The bulkier leather from along the animal's backbone is reserved for balls destined for international cricket; the thinner leather from the flanks goes into lower grades for club and school use. Two balls with the same brand stamp are not the same ball.
• The quarters. Cut leather is sent out to be formed into quarters and then returned to London.
• The stitching. Six rows of thread are sewn along the seam by hand in Walthamstow. On a Dukes all six rows pass through both halves of the ball, which is the structural reason the seam stands up for longer than on a machine-stitched ball.
• The finish. The ball is squeezed in a round mould to true it up as a sphere, wax is melted into the leather, and a final polish goes on top.

The dimensions themselves are not the manufacturer's to choose. Law 4 fixes the weight and circumference of a men's ball inside a narrow band, with lighter and smaller specifications for women's and junior cricket, so competition between ball makers happens almost entirely in the leather, the winding and the seam. The rest of the code that governs what happens to the ball once it is in play — how many are allowed, when a replacement is permitted, what counts as unfair alteration of its condition — is set out in the laws every cricket follower should know, and it is the MCC that owns and revises that code.

Who actually uses it

Three Test-playing jurisdictions use the Dukes as their standard red ball: England, the West Indies and Ireland. Everywhere else the choice is a Kookaburra or, in India, an SG.

That distribution is why an England tour to Australia and an Australia tour to England are almost different sports. The comparison is set out from the other side in the guide to the Kookaburra and why it stops helping bowlers so early, but the short version is that the Dukes tends to keep its seam and keep offering something to a bowler deeper into an innings, while the Kookaburra hands the initiative to batters after the first hour or so. Neither is objectively correct. They produce different cricketers, which is the whole problem.

	Dukes	Kookaburra
Made in	Walthamstow, London	Melbourne
Seam stitching	All six rows by hand, through both halves	Two structural rows, four cosmetic
Leather finish	Alum-tanned, darker red	Lacquered, brighter
Test use	England, West Indies, Ireland	Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan
Reputation	Helps bowlers longer	Goes soft, favours batting

The two failed transplants

Both boards have tried to import the other's ball, and both experiments were abandoned.

Cricket Australia introduced the Dukes into the Sheffield Shield from the 2016-17 season, for matches played after Christmas. The intention was straightforward: give Australian batters and bowlers exposure to the ball they would face on an Ashes tour. Domestic players complained that it gave the quick bowlers too much, and that spinners were left with nothing to do. Cricket Australia dropped it and went back to a full Kookaburra season, a decision covered in the guide to how the Sheffield Shield works.

The English attempt ran in the other direction. From 2023 the ECB trialled the Kookaburra in a portion of the County Championship — two rounds in the first year, expanded to four of the fourteen rounds in the two seasons that followed. The reasoning mirrored Australia's: English bowlers who only ever bowl with a Dukes arrive in Perth or Brisbane with a skill set that does not transfer, and something had to give them a rehearsal.

What the trial produced instead was a run of high-scoring draws. County directors of cricket turned against it, the ECB's professional game committee accepted the argument, and the 2026 season reverted to the Dukes for all fourteen rounds. The wider structure of the competition that ran the experiment is explained in the guide to how the County Championship works.

The two failures are instructive. In both cases the domestic game rejected the foreign ball not because it was a bad ball but because it changed the balance of the competition the players were actually trying to win. Preparing a handful of tourists for one series is a weak argument against nine months of your own cricket being distorted.

The summer everything went soft

The Dukes has been in trouble before, but 2025 was the loudest it has been.

During England's home Test series against India, balls repeatedly lost their shape and hardness far earlier than they should have. Replacements were being sought in single figures of overs in some innings rather than anywhere near the eighty-over mark at which a new ball becomes available. At Lord's the second new ball taken by India lasted barely ten overs before it had to be changed. Batters complained that the ball stopped doing anything; bowlers complained that it stopped being a cricket ball.

Criticism came from both dressing rooms and from former players in the commentary box. The ECB collected as many used balls as it could and returned them to British Cricket Balls Ltd for examination, and the company agreed to review the process.

Jajodia's public position was combative. He questioned whether the modern player was too quick to blame equipment, pointed to the weight of contemporary bats striking the ball, and noted the unusually hot and dry English summer as a factor in how leather behaves. He also said the company was willing to make changes. Both things can be true: a hand-made product with a long and partly overseas supply chain has more failure points than a machine-made one, and a ball being hit by a heavier bat on a harder, drier outfield takes more punishment than it did thirty years ago.

Nothing about this argument is settled, and it is worth being honest about that. There is no published, independently verified account of a single manufacturing change that caused the problem. What exists is a pattern of complaint, a manufacturer's review, and a governing body that has committed itself more firmly than ever to the ball in question.

What it means for how England bowls

The practical consequence of all this shows up in the bowlers England produces.

A young quick in the county system spends his formative seasons with a ball that rewards a repeatable, seam-up delivery on a fourth-stump line, in April and September conditions where the ball will do something on its own. That is a specific apprenticeship, and it has produced a long line of bowlers who are superb at home and have to reinvent themselves abroad. The lineage is traced in the guides to England's seam bowling tradition and to how English swing bowling developed.

The counterpart skill — getting a soft, scuffed ball to do something in the fortieth over on a flat surface — is what reverse swing covers, and it is the skill England has historically had to learn on tour rather than at home. The seasonal weather that makes the Dukes so effective in the first place is set out in the guide to how English pitches change through a season.

For batters the effect is the mirror image. An English top order that has spent its whole career leaving a hard, seaming Dukes outside off stump often finds the first hour in Australia strangely easy and the two hours after that a nightmare, because the ball has stopped doing what it is supposed to do and the bowlers are still there. That asymmetry is one of the quieter reasons the Ashes so rarely produces a series won by the touring side.

Following the argument

The ball is one of the few pieces of cricket equipment worth paying attention to as a story in its own right. County scorecards record how many balls were changed and when. Statements from the ECB and from the manufacturer, and the annual review of playing conditions, are where the substantive decisions appear. If you want to see the difference for yourself, watch a Championship match in the first week of April and then the same fixture in July: same ball, same bowlers, completely different game. More of the domestic picture is on the cricket in England hub and in the overview of how English domestic cricket is structured.

Sources and method

This page rests on the manufacturer's and governing bodies' own published material — British Cricket Balls Ltd's company history, ECB announcements on playing conditions and the County Championship ball, Cricket Australia's statements on the Sheffield Shield trial, and Law 4 of the Laws of Cricket as published by the MCC. Reporting on the 2025 soft-ball episode, including the collection of used balls for examination and the manufacturer's response, is drawn from contemporaneous coverage and cross-checked across outlets. The description of the manufacturing process follows published accounts of the Walthamstow operation and its leather supply. Where a figure would date quickly — numbers of employees, annual output, precise ball prices — it has been left out. This article is descriptive; no statistics here are computed from our own datasets.