Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

34 Chapter Seven ‘Willsher’s Hand is Very High’ 10 Just after six o’clock on 26 August 1862, in front of a packed house of Ovalites, Edgar Willsher was no-balled for throwing by umpire John Lillywhite. Although Lord Harris reported that his father reckoned there was a ‘fling’ in Willsher’s action, there was no real groundswell of opinion that he was, in the modern parlance, a ‘chucker’, but there was a general consensus that he regularly contravened Law 10. In effect, this allowed round-arm, but not over-arm, bowling, and it was for raising his arm above the shoulder that Edgar was now penalised. The ructions this caused in the cricket world will be discussed later, but first we need to go back in time to understand how it was that the ‘Lion of Kent’ came to be at the centre of a storm that had been brewing since the turn of the century. Eighteenth-century laws of cricket make no specific mention of how the ball should be bowled, but we do know that originally the bowler rolled the ball along the ground, that is literally ‘bowling’ it. Some time before the nineteenth century, bowlers started to ‘pitch’ the ball underhand, thus leading to the straightening of the bat as the batsman now had to cope with the ball bouncing. So far so good, but the history of the game has seen a constant struggle for ascendancy between bat and ball, and, round about 1790, one man decided that the bowler’s weaponry should be enhanced. Tom Walker, memorably described by John Nyren in The Cricketers of My Time , our primary source of information on the legendary Hambledon Club, was the man who ‘began the system of throwing instead of bowling’, meaning that he raised his arm perhaps up to his shoulder. The Hambledon Club seems to have quickly nipped this practice in the bud, but the early years of the new century saw the MCC, now the game’s chief legislator, so concerned about the continuance of this ‘menace’ that it introduced for the first time a law that specified that ‘the ball is to be bowled under-hand and delivered with the hand below the elbow.’ The main culprit at this time was John Willes, born at Headcorn near Ashford in Kent in 1778. The well-known story of his sister 10 ‘In Memoriam’, line 1; see note 4 above.