Lives in Cricket No 39 - Alec Watson

13 Early Life enough, so caution is required. However, the main problem lies with the bride’s name above: Elizabeth. For the cricketer’s mother always appears as Rebecca. It is of course possible that the bride had two Christian names, Elizabeth Rebecca, or Rebecca Elizabeth. It is also possible that Elizabeth died early in the marriage, for such tragedies were not unknown at that time, though there is no record of her death; thereafter Robert took Rebecca as his second wife. At any rate his daughters were called Rebecca, an apparently uncommon name in both Ireland and Coatbridge at the time, and Elizabeth; so the possible link is again established. Alec’s own children were later to include Rebecca, George and Robert. So again the various children’s names tend to point to the cricketer’s family being the second rather than the first Watsons mentioned above. Other evidence suggests that the Watsons came from the Belfast area. Robert Bell, in his Book of Ulster Surnames (p246), notes that the Watsons in Ireland were almost wholly confined to Ulster, particularly the counties of Antrim, Down and north Armagh. He notes too that the name is of English or Scots origin, ‘being one of the thirty most common names in Scotland’. It is possible then that the cricketer’s family was among those transplanted from Scotland or England to Ulster during the ‘Plantation’ two centuries or more earlier. Devine, in The Scottish Nation (p503), notes that many of the immigrants from Ireland to industrial North Lanarkshire in the 1840s also came from Antrim, Down and north Armagh – that is the Belfast and Lagan Valley area – thus again placing the Watsons in that area; and Belfast was very much the main centre of that area. One is tempted by the thought that the future mineworking Watsons may have come from the Coalisland area of east Tyrone, on the edge of the above region. This was one of the few coal- mining centres in Ireland, but records for that area show no relevant names. As stressed earlier, much of the above has to be regarded as conjectural; but it seems reasonable to say that Alec Watson the cricketer was almost certainly born on 4 November, 1844, and probably in or around Belfast. The following possible family tree of the Watsons may be helpful.