Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

and bowling accurately. He always maintained that a boy had to learn the rudiments of the game before he was ten years old if he was to have any chance of being successful. Of those brothers, it is appropriate here to say something first about Clem who was born in 1875. He was an outstanding cricketer as a schoolboy at Uppingham School, where he was coached by H.H.Stephenson. He was in the First XI in 1891 at the tender age of fifteen. In 1893 he scored 722 runs for the school at an average of 90.25, with three successive hundreds, including an unbeaten 183 against Repton, when he carried his bat through the innings. He was captain in 1894. Going up to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1895, he won his Blue as a freshman. He scored 115 against Oxford in 1898 the year when he was Cambridge’s captain. For many years he held the record for the most runs scored in the annual Varsity match. Clem was also a more than useful right-arm medium-paced bowler. He was also able to bowl left-handed, a facility he had acquired in the vicarage garden at Bolsterstone, and he once bowled both right and left-handed in the same first-class match, for Cambridge against Surrey at The Oval in 1895. After his first season at Cambridge, Clem Wilson was one of the party that Frank Mitchell took to America in 1895. Between 1896 and 1899, he played nine times for Yorkshire and he toured South Africa in 1898/99 with Lord Hawke’s team, appearing in two Test Matches there, though he was always amused that the matches were retrospectively given Test match status. In the Second Test, at Cape Town, he batted at No 4 in England’s first innings and ran out of partners when only 10 not out. He soon gave up first-class cricket to take up holy orders and was ordained in 1901. Clem did not abandon cricket entirely however. He played occasionally in club cricket and for clergy teams. In the 1920s, on leading a rather venerable Yorkshire Clergy team on to the field at Old Trafford in a match against the Lancashire Clergy, he remarked: “I think we ought to sing ‘O God our help in ages past.’” Clearly Clem had some of the wit for which his brother Rockley was better known. We shall have much to say about Rockley’s remarkable cricket career shortly. Suffice here to set the scene and say something about his abilities at the game. Rockley Wilson was of medium height and build with a rather boyish countenance. This makes him easily recognisable in team photographs, often with his cap pulled rather low over his eyes and the collar of his jacket turned up. A more formal portrait photograph of him in his thirties shows The Wilson Family 11