Lives in Cricket No 45 - Brief Candles 2

32 “When New Zealand went in, Thomas bowled only one over before giving way to Wilson, a medium-paced right-hander, who may be a better bowler than he looked this evening, when he had little opportunity of showing what he can do” ( Northampton Daily Echo ). He settled down on the second day, bowling steadily and to a very good length, according to the Echo . But the misfortune that his bowling had attracted at school hadn’t forsaken him: ‘In his ninth over he would have taken his first wicket had [Dick] Woolley, fielding deep on the off side, been able to hold a catch’ (Echo) . This was a ‘bad miss’ according to the Northampton Daily Chronicle , but overall Wilson’s bowling seems to have stood up well, and to have been fairly reflected in his economical innings figures of 15-3-26-0. He had more success second time round, returning 5-0-19-1 as the New Zealanders knocked off the 155 needed for victory in 56 overs. His wicket was that of M.L. ‘Curly’ Page, caught by Arthur Cox for 34 off the last ball of Wilson’s second over, the last of the four wickets that Northants took in the innings. There is, sadly, no description of this dismissal in any of the many local newspapers that reported the match; perhaps the reporters had all gone home, giving up the match as a bad job, before Harry Wilson’s moment of triumph. The general verdict on his performance was delivered in the Peterborough Standard : like Snowden (who scored an impressive 35 in the first innings), he had acquitted himself “remarkably well” on his county debut. Indeed, both debutants had done enough to earn selection for the county’s next match, due against Somerset at the County Ground in Northampton, beginning on 27 June. Snowden played 21 , but sadly for him, not Wilson. His place in the team had been confirmed on 25 June, but then his all-too- familiar misfortune struck again. The Northampton Daily Echo reported on the 27th that he had had to stand down ‘owing to an accident in a club game on Thursday [25th] when he played a ball on to his forehead and received a cut over one of his eyes - a nasty wound in which four stitches were needed’. Or you might prefer the rather different version in the Northampton Daily Chronicle on the 26th: ‘Liddell came in at the last moment for H.Wilson, injured in a bicycle accident’. I scoured the local press without success for any details of this accident, but by the 29th the Chronicle was telling the same story about Wilson’s absence as the Echo , and I suppose we must accept that as the true explanation. That wasn’t, quite, the end of Harry Wilson’s flirtation with county cricket, or with misfortune. In June 1932 he was invited to replace Vallance Jupp (‘unavailable’) in the Northamptonshire side for the Championship match against Essex at Northampton, but he had to decline because of ‘an old injury [that had] lately troubled him’ ( Peterborough Standard ); the Petriburgian later reported that he had had to turn down this opportunity ‘on account of a strain’. He was, it seems, fated not to play at first-class level again after his one match on his home ground in June 1931; surely one of the unluckiest of one-match wonders. 21 Snowden went on to claim a regular place in the county side up to 1939. Never a run