Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

We know little of the part that cricket played in the curriculum of Bilton Grange School. However, some coaching in the game was provided and Rockley must have taken part in matches at the school. Above is a charming photograph of a young Rockley, nonchalantly posed with a cricket bat, taken when he was a pupil at Bilton Grange. We know that Rockley impressed his headmaster with his talent. The Reverend Earle wrote to Rockley’s father on his progress at school as a twelve-year-old: “You have a capital boy blessed with the happy way of doing everything right – and can’t he play cricket too.” It was at Bilton Grange that Rockley became fascinated with the history, personalities and statistics of the game, an interest that he was to maintain throughout his life. It was not pre-ordained that Rockley would go on to Rugby School. In the same letter to Rockley’s father, the headmaster says “Let us wait and see what happens at Rugby before ... we talk of Marlborough and Winchester.” But in the event it was to be Rugby. Rockley was an able pupil. In 1892 he secured a place at Rugby by winning a Mathematics Scholarship at the school and coming fifth in the Classics Scholarship examination. Under the firm leadership of its headmaster Dr John Percival, who had given up the presidency of Trinity College, Oxford, to return to schoolmastering, Rugby School was recovering the high reputation it had enjoyed a generation earlier when Thomas Arnold was headmaster. The daily routine for the boys was harsh, with cold baths and chapel before breakfast, and discipline was strict. The practice of fagging could be humiliating if not downright brutal. For Rockley, a shy and not particularly robust youngster, adjustment to life at the school could not have been easy. But like other public schools in the last half of the nineteenth century, Rugby set great store on the importance of sport, and particularly of cricket, in the education of its “young gentlemen.” 9 Rockley Wilson excelled at most sports. He was an outstanding middle distance runner, winning the school mile competition in three successive years, his time of 4 minutes 46 seconds in 1898, the last of these, being the third fastest ever recorded at Rugby. Rockley also played rackets and fives to an excellent standard, and, though to a lesser standard, rugby. 18 School and University 9 In Tom Brown’s Schooldays , the famous novel by Thomas Hughes set in Rugby School, when a master observes that cricket is a “noble game”, Tom replies, “Isn’t it. But it’s more than a game. It’s an institution.”