Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

94 Ely’s Mr Chips Francis William Wilkinson , ‘F.W.’ or, to generations of schoolboys, ‘Wilkie’, was a north-easterner, born on 4 October 1895 at Norton-on-Tees in County Durham, near Middlesbrough. His family background seems to have been relatively humble: his father was a joiner in the building trade. Nevertheless, Francis was educated at Middlesbrough High School before, late in 1915, he joined the Machine Gun Corps. He served at home and in France until his demob in January 1919, winning the Military Medal in 1918 for bravery under fire, ‘showing extreme indifference to personal danger’. Later in 1919 he secured entry to Clare College, Cambridge, where he took his BA degree in 1922. At Cambridge, sport seems to have been at least as important to him as his studies, for he received no more than an ‘ordinary’ classics degree, but won three Blues at two different sports; neither of which was cricket. He played no first-class cricket at Cambridge, and neither did he appear in any of the main trial matches, though he became a member of the Crusaders club. A possibly mis-spent youth was in evidence when he won a Blue for billiards in March 1921, captaining his side to an easy win over Oxford. But his principal sport at the University was football. Generally playing as a full-back, he missed out on a Blue in the 1920 match, 158 but made up for this with appearances in the Varsity matches of December 1921, in a 3-0 defeat at Stamford Bridge, and December 1922, in an unexpected 2-0 win at the Crystal Palace. Newspaper reports of his matches during his Cambridge seasons suggest a strong but fallible player, but he saved the best until it really mattered, for The Times ’ report of the 1922 Varsity Match says that ‘in all probability [he] never played so well in his life as yesterday’. 159 Football continued to be an important part of his life after leaving Cambridge, as he played as a defender in 24 matches for the Corinthians over the five seasons starting 1922/23, 160 and also represented Cambridgeshire. But as his Corinthians link shows, he was always only an amateur sportsman. After leaving the university in 1922, he secured a teaching job at King’s School at nearby Ely. Initially he took the job for just a year, but in the end he stayed at King’s, teaching games and English, for the whole of his working life, retiring at the end of 1959. His legacy at the school is profound. In 1924 he introduced a house system for school sports, and later he became housemaster of one of the school’s [then] four houses; later still, a new house was named in his honour. As 158 He played in the place of one of the regular full-backs in several of the games leading up to the Varsity match, but was replaced by the regular man for the Blues match itself. For the University against Nunhead in November, he turned out alongside four others better known as cricketers: goalkeeper Percy Chapman and forwards Gilbert Ashton, Hubert Ashton and A.G.Doggart. 159 The Times , 14 December 1922. 160 See Rob Cavallini, Play Up Corinth , Stadia, 2007. First Ballers, and a Mystery