Lives in Cricket No 6 - Bill Copson

doubt relatives and friends helped Bill Copson senior, in their various ways, to bring up his family. It was often said that Bill looked somewhat undernourished during the early days of his cricket career. Sam Cadman, the Derbyshire coach when Bill started his association with the club, once remarked, ‘Trouble is, he’s had more dinner times than dinners.’ The work of a miner, hewing coal by hand, was an extremely arduous job requiring great stamina and reserves of energy. Although he was not a particularly big man physically, he developed powerful muscles in his arms which stood him in excellent stead when bowling. Cadman, who could turn a phrase, once likened him to a gorilla, because of his long arms and big hands. Donald Carr and Tony Brown have both remarked that he ‘seemed to have longer arms than anyone else.’ His slightly spare frame would no doubt have been an advantage when working in the extremely confined and cramped areas underground. Bill Copson, together with his county colleague Tommy Mitchell, are probably the only first-class cricketers and certainly the only Test cricketers who owe the beginnings of their cricket careers entirely to the 1926 General Strike, which took place in May of that year. The Trades Union Congress had called out on indefinite strike all workers in key industries such as the railways, the docks, steel and general transport to support the Miners’ Federation, who were striking against wage cuts and longer hours proposed by the mine owners. This strike threat had been postponed from 1925 to 12 Early Days and Family Origins High Street, Stonebroom, no longer a pit village, on a quiet afternoon in 2008.