Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

85 Willsher showed his own frustration in a letter to Bell’s Life on 11 January 1869, albeit written with his perennial optimism: Why not grasp the “hand of friendship, and become, as all cricketers ought to be, brothers. It would equally benefit both North and South, and by not doing so we are injuring ourselves only … . Would Daft kindly undertake to get a North Eleven together to meet the South in a match for the benefit of the fund? I believe most of the leading players in the North would play if asked; it would then show that all of us are doing our best to benefit the society and its members. Upon reading the letter, the Sporting Gazette was almost apoplectic, referring to the ‘charming “gush”’ of Willsher’s ‘hand of friendship’ offer, which could: … only be attributed to the cheery influence of Christmas festivities. Now, we ask Willsher – and he is a shrewd man, as well as an accomplished master of his art – we ask him, in sober seriousness too, whether in the course of his extensive experience he ever discovered genuine friendship or brotherly feeling amongst professional cricketers? If Willsher cannot answer the question, Daft, the best cricketer and most gentlemanly of the northern school, may. Happily for the less cynical minded amongst us, brotherly feeling was eventually restored, but not by Daft. It was George Freeman, Edgar’s old colleague from their North American trip, who helped him arrange the 1870 fixture already described. Once again, the éminence grise had shown statesmanlike qualities at a time of crisis, and in doing so had won vastly more friends than enemies. Edgar’s form never scaled the dizzy heights of 1868 again, but he did enough in the new season, with 64 first-class wickets at 16.06, to merit selection for another overseas tour the next winter. (Modern compilations, though, put him outside the leading twenty in the bowling averages in this particular season.) The Penny Illustrated Paper of 11 September 1869 reported the inclusion of the ‘Kent veteran’ in a putative team bound for the Antipodes on 20 September. Along with six members of the previous year’s North American squad, the prized name Winding Down Willsher in later years, still with a ‘faraway look’.