Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

Chapter Ten Back to County Cricket The tour of Australia had been a chastening experience for Rockley Wilson and he must have thought seriously about retiring from the first-class game before the 1921 season began. However, when Yorkshire approached him, as in previous seasons, to join the county side in the August school vacation, Rockley did not hesitate in accepting. It turned out to be an excellent decision. Although Yorkshire finished a disappointing third in the Championship, defeated more by the bad weather than by superior opponents, Rockley Wilson had an outstanding season. Once more appearing in only eight Championship matches, he headed Yorkshire’s bowling averages with 41 wickets at a mere 11.34. He played in a further two first-class matches for Yorkshire, against the Australians at Bramall Lane in July, and against MCC in the Scarborough Festival. In all matches his haul was 51 wickets at 11.19, putting him comfortably at the head of the national bowling averages. In the match against the Australians at Bramall Lane, Wilson took three for 24 and three for 35 and had the satisfaction of trapping Warwick Armstrong, the Australian skipper (and himself a leg break bowler), lbw for low scores in both innings. Yorkshire were badly beaten however, collapsing in their second innings from 92 for two to 113 all out against the speed of Gregory and the wiles of Arthur Mailey. The more notable Wilson bowling performances in the Championship were five for 54 and nine in the match against Nottinghamshire; seven for 32 off 23 overs against Middlesex, the Champions-to-be, who were dismissed for 82, when, according to Wisden, he “never bowled better in his life”; four for 4 off 7.1 overs against Essex; and eleven wickets in the match against Sussex, the last of the Championship season, including seven for 67 off 37 overs in the first innings. Such an outstanding set of bowling performances in such a short period within a season can rarely have been bettered. Part-time cricketer as he may have been, they show what a contribution Rockley Wilson made to the Yorkshire side in the closing weeks of the 1921 season. Wisden put it this way. “Not only did he do excellent work 90