Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

24 Chapter Five With the All-England Eleven By the 1840s, something of a communications revolution was going on. Many of the railway routes to London had opened up, dramatically cutting average journey times, and the written word could now be transmitted much more speedily with the introduction of the Penny Black and the increasing use of telegraphy. Cricket was a major beneficiary, as matches could be more easily arranged and attended and also reported, in journals such as Bell’s Life in London . Legislation was slowly allowing the ordinary worker more leisure time, culminating in the Factory Act of 1850, which obliged textile mills to close at 2 pm on Saturday. In addition to increasing the potential participants in, and audience for, a range of sports, these developments reflected a new belief in the benefits of manly exercise, and a delight in progress that saw its apotheosis in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The time was ripe for the expansion of the professional game, and all it required was a man with some entrepreneurial vision to help that come about. Enter William Clarke, a rotund, one-eyed, 47-year-old lob bowler from Nottingham. His idea was to take an itinerant eleven of the best available cricketers around the country to play local teams consisting of up to 22 men. Given that until Clarke came along there had not been enough top cricket to make a full-time living, the scheme was attractive to both established and up-and-coming players. Members of the team could earn perhaps £5 for a big match, riches compared with an average labourer on 30 shillings a week, and Clarke made sure that there was a packed fixture list to keep his charges busy. The original team, unofficially dubbed the ‘All-England Eleven’ (AEE), played its first matches in 1846. In addition to Clarke, it contained such luminaries as Pilch, Mynn and Hillyer, to be joined in 1847 by Felix and the legendary trio of John Wisden and William Lillywhite of Sussex, and the young Nottinghamshire batsman George Parr, who later took over the reins from Clarke. Wisden and Parr were alone among this group in being born in the 1820s, and there would clearly be openings for younger, fitter individuals in the future. For the time being, however, Edgar needed to do more to establish himself in order to