Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

25 Chapter Two Never a run Hearing of a county cricketer bearing the unexceptional name of Harry Wilson somehow conjures the image of a solid professional from earlier days, perhaps a salt-of-the-earth working-class bowler whose persistence and capacity for hard work made him part of the backbone of his side’s attack over several years. In fact, two Harry Wilsons have played county cricket at first-class level. The first was a Yorkshireman who played half a dozen matches for Worcestershire in the early years of the 20th century, and conformed to type in at least one respect by being principally a bowler (slow left-arm). He took ten wickets in the first two innings in which he bowled in the County Championship, but was unable to repeat that success in his later matches. He also played one non-first-class match for his native county, in a three-day game at Bradford against the West Indians in 1900 - a game which lasted only 25 minutes before being rained off, without Wilson ever taking the field. But it is the other Harry Wilson I want to concentrate on here, for he was a genuine Brief Candle who, in his only first-class match, achieved something that only one other English cricketer has ever achieved - even though he might have wished that he hadn’t. He too conformed to type by being principally a bowler, at least as far as his county was concerned; but there the resemblance ends. For this Harry Wilson was a comfortably- off middle-class member of the professional classes (in the non-cricketing sense) who played his cricket as an amateur; an East Midlander well-known in his local community for his prowess both in sport and in his chosen profession; and a man who had enough other variety and achievements in his life for the presumed disappointment of his one and only first-class match to be, we may assume, largely if perhaps not totally forgotten. The first issue to sort out is his precise identity. Published scorecards of the match between Northamptonshire and the touring New Zealanders at Peterborough between 20 and 23 June 1931 name one of Northants’ two debutants as ‘H.Wilson’. As I write, CricketArchive’s player biography tells us that this was Harry Wilson, a right-arm medium-pacer and right-handed batsman who was born in England in 1897 and died at Peterborough on 25 April 1960. The Archive has no other matches for him, at any level of the game. Not a lot to go on there, then. So who was this one-match-wonder, with an achievement to his name that makes him memorable 85 years later? Time to put on the deerstalker and