Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

13 satisfactory start. Edgar’s other cricketing brother, George, had first been recorded by the Maidstone Journal playing twice in 1846 for Staplehurst, equidistant between Maidstone and Rolvenden. The loose club affiliations of the time, and the lack of major matches, are demonstrated amply by the next sighting of Edgar, turning out himself for Staplehurst against Southborough at the beginning of July 1847. No wickets and six runs represented a poor return, but George more than made up for it with eleven wickets and 18 runs. The Willshers were on the march. Recognition of the brothers’ rapid rise was soon forthcoming for, on 15 July, William was picked to play for Kent against Surrey at the Preston Hall ground in Aylesford. It was the second and last ‘important’ match to be staged there under the aegis of the local Milner family, who used spurious names such as the ‘New Kent Club’ and the ‘West Kent Cricket Club’ in their attempts to promote the setting up of a county club to play matches home and away against Surrey. The ramifications of the long-running rivalry between the east and west of the county will be dealt with later, but suffice to say that, despite an easy Kentish victory in front of a large crowd, it proved to be the last time either Aylesford or William Willsher featured at this level of the game. With Alfred Mynn and medium-pacer William Hillyer taking all the wickets, Willsher was not called upon to bowl, and bagged an ignominious ‘pair’ down at number eleven. Obscurity beckoned, and it was to be another three years before Edgar had a chance to redeem the family name. In volume four of his monumental Scores and Biographies , the essential tool for the early cricket researcher, Haygarth states that in fact Edgar, not William, first played for Kent in 1847 (in this match), but he retracts this in a later volume and confirms his county debut as 1850. Modern statisticians 2 now accept this, but the earlier date still slips through occasionally, even in Ric Sissons’ excellent history of professional cricketers, The Players . Romantic as it might be to go with 1847, Edgar at 18 had simply not achieved enough to be selected for his county, but that was to change quite dramatically over the next two summers. His local reputation was to reach such heights that he could no longer be ignored, and once he was in the Kent side he was rarely to be left out as long as he was available. 2 See www.cricketarchive.co.uk for details of the games involved. The Wisden report of Willsher’s benefit match at Lord’s in 1871 repeats the inaccurate story of his 1847 appearance for Kent. Moving On