Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

the finest shade, what a young player could be induced to learn, but, like Alfred Shaw, he could pitch the ball pretty well where he liked. “And now I’ll hit you on the toe,” he once said, and he hit it. In the middle, he was almost certain death to the firm-footed hitter and the shuffling prodder.” 54 Rockley’s advice to young bowlers is succinctly put in an article on bowling in The Cricketer Winter Annual , 1921-22: “Don’t neglect length. Length is the most important thing in bowling. Don’t be led away by the snare of a big swerve or a big break. The most effective ball is a good length ball which turns a little and comes quick off the pitch. Study your field for your own bowling and bowl to your field: and above all, remember length, length, length.” Rockley was here describing the attributes of his own bowling. Douglas Jardine was a pupil at Winchester from 1914 to 1919. 55 He wrote later that “there has probably never been a stronger galaxy or combination of coaching talent functioning at one and the same time as Mr E.R.Wilson, Mr H.S.Altham and Schofield Haigh who were all at Winchester at the same time” 56 though, as we shall see, Wilson was serving in the Forces for most of the time that the young Douglas Jardine was at Winchester. Wilson was an outstanding bowling coach but he did not neglect to implant in his young charges the essentials of batsmanship. According to Rockley, a youngster’s batting potential could be assessed from how well he played leg-side strokes, particularly the on-drive, but he believed that youngsters should first be taught to master off-side strokes. “The stroke of primitive man must have been to the on-side for you will always find that the natural tendency of the small boy is to pull everything. My theory is that a boy will never have any difficulty learning all the on-side strokes if he has once mastered those on the off-side, for they will come natural to him.” 57 A frequently quoted remark attributed to Jardine was that Rockley Wilson emphasised the importance of getting behind the ball in the following way: “When I play back and miss the ball, I like to see it hit Wilson.” Jardine was one of many persons with whom Winchester 52 54 R.C.Robertson-Glasgow, More Cricket Prints , T.Werner Laurie, 1948, p.33. 55 Jardine’s biographer has provided a fascinating account of life at the school during these years (when wartime privations compounded the harshness of the school’s regular regimes). See Christopher Douglas, Douglas Jardine: a Spartan Cricketer , Methuen (Paperback Edition), 2003, pp.6-10. 56 D.R.Jardine, Cricket, J.M.Dent (Second Edition), 1945, p.133. 57 Interview in Cricket , 6 July 1905, p. 242.