Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

99 My first thought, on seeing the report in the Oxford Mail early on in my researches into F.W., was that the reporter, having heard of the Yorkshire Wilkinson but not of his Cambridgeshire namesake, had simply assumed, wrongly, that the player in The Parks was the Yorkshireman. However, discovery of the team-list in the earlier papers introduced a much stronger element of doubt. Surely the MCCA, when they announced their team to play at Oxford, knew which Wilkinson they were selecting? So we look into this a bit deeper, and find what may well be the origin of the confusion in, of all places, a pair of articles in The Cricket Statistician in the early 1980s. First, in issue 32 (December 1980), in a short piece entitled ‘Duties of a twelfth man’, the writer John S.Milner refers to a ‘Wilkinson’ being substituted in the 1939 match, and continues: The Wilkinson involved could have been F.W.Wilkinson of Cambridgeshire, or F.Wilkinson, a successful bowler for Yorkshire II … I would welcome positive evidence as to his identity. Ten months later, in issue 35, Robert Brooke includes a list of ‘Substitutes batting or bowling’ in first-class cricket. He prefaces the list by referring back to Milner’s piece, and remarks of the list that ‘although we do not claim completeness, it is felt that the following is more comprehensive than has ever appeared before’. The 58th of the 62 entries in Brooke’s list concerns the 1939 match, and records that D.J.F.Watson substituted for F.W.Wilkinson. No equivocation here over ‘Which Wilkinson?’, and from then on, all ACS and ACS-related publications, including the guide to Cambridgeshire cricketers, have credited F.W. with this single first-class appearance. So the inevitable question: What ‘positive evidence’ was adduced between the two articles in The Cricket Statistician , sufficient to satisfy its then editor that the wicket-taker in The Parks was F.W., rather than Frank, Wilkinson? I posed this question to Robert Brooke in April 2010, and in his reply he mentioned that he no longer has most of his books, but ‘relying on memory I feel it likely that it was F.Wilkinson of Yorkshire, but unsupported memory is not something I usually give much credence to.’ I posed the same question to Philip Bailey and Peter Wynne- Thomas, two of the compilers of the Who’s Who , but neither could offer an unequivocal answer. Philip responded in these terms: ‘I have a vague recollection of the MCCA saying it was the Cambridgeshire man, but … I might have imagined [this] and it would have been Philip Thorn who would have done the player research in most cases.’ Sadly, Philip Thorn, the third compiler of the Who’s Who , and his vast archive are no longer with us to explore that avenue further. My own approaches to the MCCA have not produced anything more helpful either. First Ballers, and a Mystery Frank Wilkinson, of Yorkshire.