Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

James Rimington, a barrister, the only son of Henry’s sister Mary and her husband, John Rimington. John died in 1820 and Mary in 1838. One of James Rimington’s projects was to complete the rebuilding of the old Hall which dated from 1640. The work, including the landscaping of the adjoining park, was completed in 1831. The new Hall, the third to occupy the site, was large and stately as befitted the home of a successful and prosperous Victorian gentleman. James Rimington died in 1839. His successor, another James, adopted the surname Rimington-Wilson in accordance with the bequest of Henry Wilson. It is in relation to this James Rimington-Wilson that we find the first mention of cricket in the family history. In 1849, James Rimington-Wilson took into his employment at Broomhead Hall, Edwin (Ned) Stephenson, then a seventeen year old lad but destined to become a Yorkshire cricketer of some renown, playing in 82 first-class matches, including 42 for the county between 1861 and 1873. He was one of the party of English cricketers that made the first tour of Australia in 1861/62. We know little of Stephenson’s role at Broomhead Hall. Since James Rimington-Wilson was then unmarried, Stephenson would not have been employed to coach any sons. Stephenson, who stayed in his post for three years, remarked that he was grateful to his employer “for his first introduction to the cricket field.” 3 This shows that by the middle of the nineteenth century there was an active interest in cricket even in small rural communities such as Bolsterstone. We know that in the 1880s there was a Broomhead Cricket Club, presumably drawing on members of the Broomhead Hall household (which at this time numbered ninety people) as well as villagers, and also a Bolsterstone Cricket Club, based in the village and playing its matches at Hagg Field, now home to the Bolsterstone Rugby Club. There was also a cricket club and field in Wigtwizzle, a small village between Bolsterstone and Broomhead Hall. These clubs may well have been founded earlier in the century for, as the game spread from its rural beginnings in the south east to the Midlands and the North, Sheffield became a major centre of cricket and by the 1820s a host of cricket clubs had been established in the town and surrounding villages. As well as playing for the Broomhead club, Ned Stephenson was probably The Wilson Family 7 3 Arthur Haygarth, Cricket Scores and Biographies , Vol V, 1855 to 1876, Longmans and Co., 1876, p.357.