Lives in Cricket No 5 - Rockley Wilson

captain in three Championship matches when Geoffrey Wilson was out of the side with an injured hand. Outside the Championship, Rockley had a quiet game for Yorkshire in the drawn match against MCC at the Scarborough Cricket Festival scoring no runs and taking no wickets. The final match of the season on 14, 15 and 17 September was Yorkshire’s game against the Rest of England at The Oval. It was to be Rockley Wilson’s final appearance in first-class cricket. As so often with these end-of-season fixtures at this time however, the match was drawn. Indeed it was disappointing as a contest, effectively a one innings match. Yorkshire scored 430 for four wickets in their first innings, Percy Holmes top scoring with 99 and Rockley of course not being called upon to bat. The strong Rest eleven were then dismissed for 273 in their only innings, Rockley taking two for 30. Taking the season as a whole, Wilson had a batting average of 12.16 and took just 12 wickets at 27.41. Summing up, while his batting might occasionally still have been of value, Rockley Wilson’s bowling had clearly fallen away. And it was his bowling that had been his greatest asset over the years. Rockley was now 44 years old and his age was beginning to become more apparent, even among the relatively elderly sides which were characteristic of county cricket in the twenties. Of course, Wilfred Rhodes was older and still going strong – he topped the Yorkshire bowling averages in 1923 with 127 wickets at 11.49 – but as a professional he had more incentive to do so than Rockley. Yorkshire were now able to call on a strong and varied attack throughout the season. Roy Kilner, Abram Waddington, Emmott Robinson and George Macaulay had all established themselves in the side since the end of the First World War. We do not know whether Yorkshire indicated to Rockley at the end of the 1923 season that he should not expect to be called upon in 1924, or whether he decided himself to call it a day as a first-class cricketer and concentrate on his teaching career. Whatever the facts, it had probably become clear to him that his first-class career was over. In that career, spanning intermittently twenty-four seasons, Rockley Wilson took 467 wickets in first-class cricket at an average of 17.63. For Yorkshire, his tally was 197 wickets at an average of 15.76. These are excellent figures by any standard. Back to County Cricket 97