Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

10 Origins Only a few snippets have been handed down to us about his childhood. Arthur Haygarth, cricket’s most assiduous chronicler, tells us that he first learnt the game from his brothers when eight or nine. In the first edition of his Cricketers’ Companion , published in 1865, John Lillywhite says that ‘when seven years old he bowled round arm to his brother in an apple orchard – a tree for wicket, home-made bat, and a wooden ball, and kept at it during winter in an old shed.’ Therefore, despite the minor difference in age, the two accounts are in essence identical, and this is not surprising given the fact that Haygarth got the cricketers themselves to fill in a form with their biographical details. His brother William, fourteen years his senior, would have been his main mentor, assisted by George, just three years older. Both would play club cricket with him in later years. The same sense of authenticity is not attached to another ‘fact’ buried in the written record. Lord Harris, who captained Edgar towards the end of his career, twice wrote that ‘it is said’ that he had only one lung from boyhood, but without independent corroboration it is impossible to know. It is a shame that the social conventions of the time precluded the future Governor of Bombay from asking Willsher, a lowly professional, directly. If he did only have one lung, his marathon bowling spells would have left him short of breath, but if he had trained himself to cope from childhood, they would certainly not have been impossible. Edgar must have received a reasonable education, as he was quite capable of penning articulate letters to the newspapers in adulthood. In 1833, the first government grants were made for the setting up of church schools, and Rolvenden benefited with the founding of its own seat of learning in 1837. Elementary education was not yet compulsory, but if Edgar did attend school it would have been here, although no pupil records survive from this time. Edgar’s cricketing education, begun at home from an early age, would also have been enhanced by the visits of some of the county’s greatest cricketers to the locality. A particularly notable occasion was the game in July 1835 between Benenden and Kent at Hemsted Park, home of Twisden Hodges, the local M.P. The Park, now owned by Benenden School, was only a three-mile walk from Little Halden Farm, so it is more than likely that the six- year-old and his brothers would have formed part of the crowd of ‘at least 6,000’. Both the great allrounder Alfred Mynn and his brother Walter were playing, alongside the Wenman brothers and the legendary batsman Fuller Pilch. Edward Wenman was regarded