Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

36 match. The fact was that Lillywhite, despite being a leviathan of the game, was not quick enough to threaten the batsman’s body with serious damage, and it was only when faster bowlers began to raise the height of their arms in the 1850s that a climax was finally reached. Willsher was undoubtedly one of those faster bowlers who was seen as ‘getting away with it’ from early on in his career, but not everyone thought that his arm was too high at the point of delivery. Daft was, as ever, very supportive in this regard: He caused a great deal of bother by bowling unfairly, as was declared by many – that was, by delivery above the shoulder. … I myself always thought that Willsher’s delivery was within the limits of the old law, although it cannot be denied that to the spectators who did not watch him most closely he appeared to deliver above the shoulder. As a matter of fact, I believe that when the ball left his hand it was exactly on a level with his shoulder. On the other hand, Caffyn, despite being an admirer of his old friend, sided with the majority in that ‘there is no doubt whatever that Willsher was in the habit of bowling above the shoulder, but then so also were nine out of every ten bowlers of that time’. Even though Willsher was seen as the most flagrant abuser of Law 10, it was not he but a younger, rawer recruit whose action was the catalyst for a heated series of public exchanges in the first half of 1858. The letters page of Bell’s Life in the mid-Victorian era was the equivalent of an internet forum today, and thus reflected the immediate opinions of often anonymous correspondents, inevitably leading to personal abuse and indeed full-blown character assassination. In February 1858, the discussion centred around the singling out of the young Surrey allrounder George Griffith by ‘A M’D’, rather than other possible miscreants in the ‘throwing’ debate, such as Willsher. ‘A Charitable Cricketer’ wrote with some feeling that, as far as the noble game of cricket was concerned, ‘if discussions upon its technical points cannot be entered into without personalities and party feeling, the sooner they are discontinued the better.’ If this sentiment seems very familiar to the modern reader, we are also on well-trodden turf when we learn that Griffith, like Tom Marsden thirty years previously, had himself signed a petition against high bowling at the end of the 1857 season. The signatories included most of the UEE, including Wisden, Caffyn and John Lillywhite. The ‘Willsher’s Hand is Very High’