Lives in Cricket No 39 - Alec Watson

25 Chapter Two First-Class Cricketer In 1869 Watson was successful in obtaining a professional’s post at the Rusholme Club, near Manchester; though Rusholme is now an integral part of that city, and noted these days for its ‘Curry Mile’. The originators of its cricket club were also involved in the formation of an association football club that was in time to become Manchester City FC. The latter has gone on to greater things, whereas the cricket club has not. The Rusholme area was also the birthplace of Alec Watson’s future wife and some of his children, and in 1888 of Neville Cardus. The sojourn there also meant that by 1871 Watson would then have been living in Manchester/Lancashire for at least two years, which would have established his eligibility to play for Lancashire, when on 9 June 1873 representatives from Surrey, Middlesex, Sussex, Kent, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire decided that in inter-county matches players not qualified by birth for a county had to have resided in it for the two previous years. At any rate Watson appears to have plied his trade successfully in Rusholme in 1869 and 1870. As well as playing reasonably successfully for the club, he would probably have filled in his non-playing time by looking after the ground, and bowling to or coaching club members, etc. While that may have given him a living in summer, like most professional cricketers for decades to come, he would have had to find some other work to bolster his income during the long winter months. Perhaps such skills as he had learned in the coal mines and ironworks of Lanarkshire could have been put to use in similar industries in Lancashire. During the summers Alec would have appeared for Rusholme against such local clubs as South Manchester, Levenshulme and Didsbury; and the rather more important Manchester CC, whose Old Trafford ground also hosted Lancashire CCC. Indeed in the early season of 1871 one of Rusholme’s opponents was an eleven of the Lancashire club. In that match Watson attracted the attention of one of Lancashire’s leading players, and later captain for much of Alec’s later career with the county: Albert