Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

cricket. His innings was widely praised in the national Press and increased the reputation he was building in his native county. Rockley gave up his rooms in Trinity College after graduation, but decided to stay on at Cambridge to accept the honour of captaining the University in the 1902 season, once again following in the footsteps of his brother Clem. He had decided to make his career in school teaching and his plan was to take up a suitable appointment after the 1902 cricket season. He also planned to spend some weeks in the close season in France, improving his command of spoken French. But any immediate thoughts of France were put out of his mind by an invitation to tour America and Canada in September and October, 1901 with a team captained by B.J.T.Bosanquet. As well as the excitement of a visit to the New World, and in particular the city of Philadelphia, with its unique place in American history and its cricketing traditions, the tour was a great opportunity to continue his development as a cricketer. Tour of North America The tour party consisted of twelve amateur cricketers – and included two players who later became knights of the realm and one a clerk in holy orders. Bernard Bosanquet had played for Oxford University and Middlesex in the preceding three seasons and was to become one of cricket’s immortals as the inventor of the googly. In a memoir, Bosanquet explained how he perfected the googly using a tennis ball on a billiard table and that he first bowled a googly in 1900 in a match against Leicestershire. But his innovation was not taken seriously in England; it was two or three years later that googly bowling became a regular feature of the cricket scene. Even though he followed the game closely, it seems unlikely that Rockley Wilson was aware of this development in the art of spin bowling when he accepted the invitation to tour. Rockley was a finger spinner but we can be sure that as the tour progressed he would have been interested to learn about the wicket-taking potential of the new weapon in the wrist spinner’s armoury. 26 Cricket had been played in America since colonial days, but it was in the nineteenth century that its popularity grew until, as the School and University 31 26 Another player in the party who later was to become an exponent of googly bowling was Reggie Schwarz who had also played for Middlesex in 1901.