Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

26 light the meerschaum … The first breakthrough was to find, in the Northampton Daily Chronicle for 20 June 1931, a reference to his having been educated at The King’s School in Peterborough, where he was said to have been a prominent all-round sportsman. The school’s archivists were then able to tell me that one George Harry Wilson, born on 17 April 1905, was indeed at the school between January 1916 and July 1923. Whilst there he was certainly prominent on the cricket field but he also did not neglect his academic studies, taking his Oxford School Certificate in the year before leaving. The school magazine The Petriburgian confirms that - despite the birth date given on CricketArchive - this was indeed the man who played against New Zealand, for its Christmas 1932 edition refers to him as a county cricketer, and no-one else bearing that surname has ever played first-class cricket for Northamptonshire. The school records also tell us that his father, an ophthalmic optician, bore exactly the same christian names. Armed with that information, we turn to the genealogical websites, where sure enough we find two George Harry Wilsons born in Peterborough, one in 1873 and the other with his birth registered in the second quarter of 1905. The slightly informal second forename - the name by which the cricketing Wilson was known - is confirmed for both father and son not just by the birth and school registers but also by their entries in the 1911 census, and much later by their respective death certificates and subsequent grants of probate, which are all in the name of George Harry Wilson for both men. In 1953 The Petriburgian informed old pupils of the school that the younger G.H.Wilson had died on 22 May 1953, aged only 48. This information enabled the purchase of a copy of his death certificate, which confirms that date, and shows his place of death to have been his home in Peterborough. One of the causes of his death was given as ‘carcinoma of bronchus’, or in common parlance, lung cancer. So now we have the full set of basic biographical information about Harry Wilson, Northamptonshire cricketer. But the detective work involved in tracking these details down has revealed much more about him than just details of his name, birth and death. For it also enabled me to make contact with his daughter, Sarah Castley, who still lives near Peterborough and, although she was very young when her father died, was kindly willing to tell me a lot more about him. Taking what she has told me with the information provided by The King’s School, local newspapers, and other sources, it has been possible to build up a much fuller picture of the life of this hitherto little-known county cricketer - and Never a run A well-groomed Harry Wilson.