Lives in Cricket No 6 - Bill Copson

as 2 November, 1895 when his correct date was 2 November, 1891. Elliott was thus twenty eight when he made his first-class debut in 1920, not twenty four, and played his last games for the county in 1947 aged nearly fifty six when recalled in an emergency. 1 It is possible of course that this may have been entirely unintentional on Bill’s part, as production of a birth certificate would not necessarily have been obligatory when seeking employment in those days. When asked his age at some time before joining the Derbyshire staff in 1932 he may have given the impression that he was approaching twenty three instead of twenty four, and this became fixed for a while in record books. It was not until 1979, eight years after his death, that Bill Copson’s birth date was correctly recorded in the Derbyshire Yearbook as a result of research by the late Frank Peach, the much respected Yearbook editor and county’s statistician for many years, who had undertaken the huge task of verifying and correcting births and deaths for all the county’s first-class cricketers. Other reference books quickly followed suit. It is still somewhat surprising however, that the birth details of Copson, a Test cricketer, were apparently never checked at any time during his first-class career. The name Copson is a variant of Cobson, meaning son of Jacob, and this name can be traced back to the thirteenth century. Many Copsons can be found in the Northamptonshire and Leicestershire areas of the country. There is also a village in Leicestershire called Copston Magna which may have a connection with the derivation of the family name. Stephen Copson, a bricklayer, was born in 1808 and had a son called William Henry Copson, grandfather of the cricketer, who was born in 1844 in Thornby, Leicestershire. He was also a bricklayer and married Emma Hurst on 19 November, 1869 and had a son also called William Henry, born in Gumley, Leicestershire in 1872, who worked first for the Midland Railway Company initially at Belper as a railway porter. He subsequently moved to Stretton, not far from Chesterfield, where he boarded with the Stevens family in a railway cottage attached to the station: here he met his future wife, Hannah, a daughter of the family. This station, which was on the Midland line from Nottingham to Chesterfield, has since closed. Bill’s father subsequently took 8 Early Days and Family Origins 1 In an article in The Cricket Statistician in 2000, the late Philip Thorn listed some twenty four English cricketers who had ‘shifted’ their birth dates forward by four years or more. Pride of place, if that is the correct phrase, went to William Wilkinson, who played five matches for Nottinghamshire in 1892 and 1893, and who brought his birth date forward by ten years.