Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

Wilson played in three other first-class matches in 1919, all of them three-day affairs, two at the Scarborough Festival in September and one the annual Champion County match against the Rest of England at The Oval. Yorkshire lost the match against the Rest by ten wickets, Rockley bowling 40.5 overs in which he took three for 134, as the Rest piled up 493 with Jack Hobbs and Frank Woolley both scoring hundreds. In Yorkshire’s match against MCC at Scarborough, Wilson returned his best bowling figures of the season, seven for 46 in MCC’s first innings, a performance that may have resonated at Lord’s more than did the results he achieved in the Championship, and he also figured in another valuable partnership with Arthur Dolphin when Yorkshire had been reduced to 123 for eight wickets, the pair putting on 47 runs. Selection for the Gentlemen against the Players fixture at the Festival seventeen years after his first appearance, when still at Cambridge, must have given Rockley a great deal of pleasure, though in the match the pleasure was alloyed with more toil. The Players won easily by an innings and 110 runs. In the Players’ only innings of 397, in which Jack Hobbs and J.W.Hearne both scored centuries, Rockley Wilson took four wickets for 102 runs off 42 overs. This marathon bowling performance included the hat-trick with which Wilson finished off the Player’s innings, his victims being George Hirst (bowled), Alec Kennedy (stumped) and Arthur Dolphin (bowled). It was the first time the feat had been achieved in the fixture at Scarborough. 73 Photographs taken in 1919 show Rockley wearing a Yorkshire cap. It is not known when the cap was awarded as records were not kept at the time. Before the First World War Yorkshire caps were in the sole gift of Lord Hawke, even after he had relinquished the captaincy. Lord Hawke had had a high regard for Rockley Wilson’s abilities from his Cambridge days and the two men were on good personal terms. It seems likely that his Lordship would have awarded Rockley his cap at some date before the War. 74 What is certain is that Rockley always wore his Yorkshire cap with pride, even sometimes when bowling. In the early months of 1919 when Captain Rockley Wilson was engaged on intelligence work in inhospitable country in Syria, by First-Class Cricket After the War 72 73 This feat is perhaps unrecognised. In Pelham Warner, Gentlemen v Players, 1806 - 1949, Harrap, 1950, the author’s comments on the Scarborough match refer to Jack Hobbs’ century, his third in the season in Gentlemen v Players matches, but makes no mention of Rockley Wilson’s hat-trick. 74 This is also the view of Roy Wilkinson, the Yorkshire club statistician.