Lives in Cricket No 6 - Bill Copson

Foreword By Eric Midwinter Not only coal, but also culture, was the product of the British mining communities, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. For the highbrows, there was D.H.Lawrence’s highly-charged novel, Sons and Lovers (1913). For the middlebrows, there was A.J.Cronin’s The Stars Look Down (1935). For the lowbrows, there were the ‘flicks’, with a small genre of colliery films. We became well acquainted with the poignant gloom of the pit disaster and watched as Michael Redgrave sought, anachronistically but aptly, to be upwardly mobile, desiring a life above ground. Sporting lore was a feature of the cult. There was apparently a ready availability of footballers and cricketers, chiefly quick bowlers, such as Harold Larwood, in the pits. It was supposed that football league club directors or county cricket club committee members would whistle down the mineshaft and up would pop such a hero. Like so many Ronnie Ronaldes, these administrative siffleurs were part of the legend. Bill Copson, working down Morton Colliery from the age of fourteen, was characteristic of this breed, although it was, seemingly, during the enforced leisure of the abortive General Strike in 1926 that his gleaming talent was spotted. Ten years later he was drilling his way through many a county batting order, as the bradawl of the locally hewn Derbyshire team that, with resolution and solidity, won the 1936 County Championship. Kit Bartlett’s welcome and telling biography describes the life of this stalwart who shifted himself effortlessly from, so to say, one seam to another. Why do we find these tales of doughty county servants so satisfying? Certainly they sentimentally remind us of a lost world, with units of cricketing itinerants criss-crossing the nation on wheezing steam trains, and playing over thirty first-class games a summer, and there is little harm in such brazen nostalgia. Nor 4