Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

101 First Ballers, and a Mystery l as an amateur, F.W. would have been listed as ‘F.W.Wilkinson’ in any team lists, not, as was the actual case, as ‘Wilkinson (F.)’ l MCCA’s public announcement of the team for the Oxford match was clear that they had selected the Yorkshireman. Despite Philip Bailey’s ‘vague recollection’ of the MCCA telling him something different, surely their announcement five days before the start of the game is more persuasive than any different statement that they may, or may not, have made several decades later l there is no mention of F.W.’s selection for the Minor Counties team, nor of any injury incurred by him during that match, in the generally thorough cricket coverage of his local newspaper, the Ely Standard . For the player in The Parks being Yorkshire’s Frank Wilkinson, we have the following points: l the player listed in advance to take part in the match was ‘Wilkinson (F.) (Yorkshire)’, which not only identifies him as the Yorkshire II player but also correctly identifies him as a professional, which F.W. was not l a number of contemporary newspapers, and not just those in Yorkshire, refer to the Wilkinson in The Parks as a Yorkshire player l as might be expected, the Yorkshire Post picked up on the selection of a ‘local boy’: its report on 2 June 1939 of the teams announced by the MCCA is headed ‘Yorkshire Colt in Minor Counties Elevens’. And its report of the match on 8 June says that ‘Wilkinson, the Yorkshire Colt in the Minor Counties’ side, was injured and will play no further part in the match.’ Surely this paper, of all papers, would have got such facts right? l Frank Wilkinson was an opening bowler, so it would not be surprising for him to have been given the first over in The Parks l Frank Wilkinson missed only one match for Yorkshire II all season – the game against Staffordshire at Stafford on 14 and 15 June. This absence is consistent with him picking up a significant injury on the first day of the game in The Parks. 167 Against it being Frank Wilkinson are these points: l his possible claim to an appearance in the game at The Parks was evidently rejected by the editor of The Cricket Statistician in 1981, and by compilers of all subsequent ACS-derived publications. The evidence for this rejection is not known l there is no reference in any of the very brief biographies of Frank Wilkinson that I have seen to him playing a first-class match in 1939 for a team other than Yorkshire. … and a possible solution For me, the weight of the circumstantial evidence is persuasive that the 167 By contrast, F.W.Wilkinson was back playing on the day after the game at Oxford (10 June), when he scored 67 and took one for 23 for King’s School against Ely City.