Lives in Cricket No 6 - Bill Copson

cricketers of some renown. 3 The colliery ground at Blackwell, where John Chapman and Arnold Warren created their world record ninth-wicket partnership of 283 for Derbyshire against Warwickshire, in 1910, two years after Copson’s birth, is only a couple of miles from Stonebroom. The famous cricket ‘nursery’ of Sutton-in-Ashfield, just over the Nottinghamshire boundary, is scarcely more than a bus ride away. Coal was once ‘king’ throughout this area: it had been discovered in the locality by George Stephenson, the railway engineer, when excavating a railway tunnel through Clay Cross Hill in 1837. Morton Colliery, about a mile from Stonebroom, was opened by the Clay Cross Company in 1865 and by 1896 was employing nearly six hundred underground workers at its two mine shafts. The pit at Morton closed in 1964 and today the coal industry in Derbyshire is almost defunct: the last deep mine in the county, at Creswell, closed in 1994 and at the present time, 2008, there are a mere eleven deep-level coal mines in the whole of the United Kingdom, three of which are in the neighbouring county of Nottinghamshire. Stonebroom itself was thus a creation of the nineteenth century coal boom: the 1841 Census identifies two small hamlets, Upper and Lower Stone, with a total of only six dwellings, but by 1895 it had become a considerable village. There was a Methodist chapel in the village from 1875; its Anglican church, St Peter’s, was consecrated in 1900, and a local school was built at about the same time. Bill attended this local village school and later, at the age of fourteen, in 1922, started work at the local colliery, this being almost the sole source of employment in the immediate area. In 1913, shortly after the tragic death of their son Robert, the family decided to move away from Stonebroom and went to live in New Street, Morton, but they returned to Stonebroom after a short period, to a terraced house owned by the Clay Cross Company which employed Bill’s father. This house was one of a number specially built in 1900 for the mineworkers which consisted of eight rows, each of twenty dwellings and became known locally as 10 Early Days and Family Origins 3 More than forty cricketers who have played first-class matches for Derbyshire have been born in the county within a five mile radius of Stonebroom. The only other first-class cricketer born in the village itself was Joseph Humphries, tail end batsman and wicket-keeper, who played 276 first-class matches for the county between 1899 and 1914, and like Copson, three times for England in Tests. He was due to play in his own benefit match for Derbyshire against Nottinghamshire at Chesterfield in June 1920, but the game was abandoned without a ball bowled, the only match in the season where the county avoided defeat. He was on the first-class umpires’ list in 1933, standing in 24 matches in all.