Lives in Cricket No 24 - Edgar Willsher

93 The reasons for the failure of the business are perhaps not too difficult to find. The United Kingdom’s economy was in recession from 1875 to 1880, and Gross Domestic Product did not return to 1874 levels until 1881. The location of the business, away from the people who had known him for a quarter of a century, surely told against him, even though Greenwich is part of Metropolitan Kent. Back in Maidstone, his celebrity would probably have ensured a certain degree of success, but on the outskirts of the big city he was simply another player in an already saturated market. The simple truth was that he was too late. Others, like his nemesis John Lillywhite, had got there before him. Lillywhite’s Companion carried full-page advertisements for his ‘cricket warehouse’ in Euston Square, the forerunner of Lillywhite’s department store in Piccadilly. Willsher seems never to have been able to afford to advertise. A final reason, in Haygarth’s opinion, was lack of support from his former employers. There may be a certain amount of justification for his comments, but Kent was not entirely unsympathetic to Edgar’s plight. A committee minute of 12 March 1881 reported that he was ‘in a distressed condition’ and granted him £20 from the Alfred Mynn Memorial Fund, a trust to which he had himself donated ten shillings when it was founded in 1863. While not being enough to save his business, it was probably all that could be spared from the fund at one time. However, when in February 1882 Willsher applied for a second benefit, the committee judged it ‘not expedient’ and awarded him just £5, not enough to keep a family of six for more than a few weeks. 20 More locally, a benefit match was organised at Blackheath on 24 September 1881 between a local eleven and eighteen West Kent Wanderers, but there is no record of what the proceeds amounted to. Edgar was not completely without other sources of income. He umpired regularly in first-class cricket: he had been standing in inter-county matches about four or five times each season from 1864 onwards, and had regularly officiated at Prince’s and in games in the Canterbury week, appointed by the Kent club. His services were also secured for four matches of the Australians’ tour of 1880. At the end of the 1882 season, in response to dissatisfaction about the standard of umpiring in county cricket, the MCC invited the counties to nominate umpires to form a panel to officiate in county matches. Umpires were not permitted to stand in matches involving clubs with which they were associated and this brought 20 No evidence of bankruptcy, as such, has been found. Epitaph