Lives in Cricket No 23 - Brief Candles

97 of his team-mates also took four wickets in four balls. By the later 1930s his very best years were behind him, and from 1939 he was no longer an automatic choice in his county side. His 1938 figures for Cambridgeshire were his poorest yet; he scored only 194 runs at 24.25, and took 12 wickets at 41.66. (It may be worth bearing these figures in mind when considering the issue that forms the next part of this chapter, for these were his last Minor Counties performances before the match at Oxford that is referred to at length below.) He played only five matches for the county in 1939, but returned as a 50-year-old for three more in 1946, at which point his Minor Counties career came to an end, though he was still good enough to appear in a friendly match for Cambridgeshire against Huntingdonshire in 1952 when approaching his 56th birthday. His active cricket career over, he could now devote himself full-time to his beloved school and its local community. On top of his scholarly and sporting commitments, for a time he was also a member of Ely Urban District Council, as well as being president of the local branch of the Royal British Legion and a member of the local amateur dramatics society. F.W.Wilkinson died at his home in the city on 26 October 1987, three weeks after his 92nd birthday, leaving a not insubstantial financial inheritance to his second wife, Phyllis, who he had married in 1954 around a year after the death of his first wife Hilda, with whom he had had a daughter and a son. The fine impression he had created locally through his long life is demonstrated by the fact that his death was, literally, front-page news in the Ely Standard , where his life was summarised succinctly in these words: ‘Outstanding sportsman, beloved teacher and friend, gallant soldier, hard- working member of the community and family man’. Francis William Wilkinson was certainly all of these. But was he also a first-class cricketer who took a wicket with his first delivery at that level? I bring you a mystery … Let’s go back to June 1939. As had been the case since 1933, one of the season’s first-class fixtures was a match between a representative Minor Counties side and Oxford University in The Parks. In 1939, this fixture was scheduled to begin on 7 June. Look at the scorecard in First-Class Cricket: A Complete Record 1939 , 161 and there is F.W.Wilkinson as a member of the Minor Counties side: a fine reward, you might think, for a long and successful career for Cambridgeshire. Read the notes about the match, and you will see that Wilkinson bowled the first over of the game, and with his very first delivery took the wicket – bowled – of J.M.Lomas. Look in the Who’s Who of Cricketers , and you will find his biography: a 15-line entry, longer than that of a bona fide Test player on the opposite page, C.A.Wiles, and longer than those of many other players with far more than a single first-class appearance. This biography tells us that, in 161 Jim Ledbetter with Peter Wynne-Thomas: First-Class Cricket: A Complete Record 1939 , Breedon Books, 1991. First Ballers, and a Mystery