Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

After his quite promising start at Hull, Rockley played in three other matches for Yorkshire that summer each time when, for one reason or another, Stanley Jackson was not available. In the matches against Leicestershire and Hampshire he opened the innings with John Tunnicliffe. Clearly it was his batting rather than his bowling which had impressed the county at this time. His performances bore this out. In his four matches he averaged 31.00 with the bat, top score 79 against Warwickshire, when he and George Hirst put on 128 for the fifth wicket, and took four wickets at 32.50, and one catch. Wisden predicted cautiously that Wilson and his fellow undergraduate T.L.Taylor “may render valuable service to Yorkshire in the near future.” Taking the season as a whole, Rockley Wilson scored 649 runs at 29.50 and took 36 wickets at 27.44. These were quite promising figures but young Rockley Wilson could have had no illusions about his chances of winning a regular place in the Yorkshire side while he continued his University studies. Although Yorkshire just failed to win the Championship in 1899, at full strength they were a powerful side on the verge of a decade of unprecedented success. The county had a strong pool of players to call upon if their regulars were not available, or to give the professionals some respite from the rigours of full-time cricket. Among the amateurs they could draft into the side was Ernest Smith, a graduate of Oxford, a dashing bat and a quick bowler who, between 1888 and 1907, was regularly brought into the side in the latter half of the season – a role that Rockley Wilson was to play later in his own career. Then there was T.L.Taylor, Rockley Wilson’s Cambridge contemporary and clearly a better batsman, who also made his debut for the county in 1899 and thereafter established himself in the side until the end of the 1902, when he chose to concentrate on his business career. Frank Mitchell, another Cambridge man, first played regularly for Yorkshire in 1899, and then, like Stanley Jackson, volunteered to serve in South Africa in the Boer War and missed the 1900 season. 24 He returned and had a superb season in 1901 and then left to settle in South Africa. And there were others. No doubt Rockley Wilson’s attitude was that the future could be left to look after itself. As it turned out, the 1900 season was a very full one for the young man. He played in all eleven of Cambridge’s first-class matches, starting on 7 May with the annual season- School and University 27 24 Frank Milligan, another Yorkshire cricketer who volunteered to fight in South Africa, died of his wounds in March, 1900.