Lives in Cricket No 6 - Bill Copson

The last time I saw Bill he was locking his car up on a park where St Alkmund’s Way now runs. He was on his way down from the north for jury service at Derbyshire Quarter Sessions and no doubt spent the next week listening gravely to improbable explanations of why some youths discovered at midnight in Staveley Co-op hadn’t really been shop breaking. He was lucky if that was the worst he heard. But it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. The long face, with its deeply furrowed jowls and the little blue pittings on the pale skin where the coal dust was embedded, would have remained impassive whatever the case. It always did. Bill always got on with the job – and never took long about it. Twells went on to describe a moment in a pre-war match 42 between Derbyshire and Warwickshire: ‘But as a bowler . . . or as boweller as they said in Derbyshire then. Yes. A boweller, a de-gutter. Derby. Bank Holiday. Hot day. Derbyshire pressing for the championship and Warwickshire to bat before 10,000 pressing hard upon the boundary. The tension on. Croome and Santall to open. The blond snowy hair and the rosy cheeks. And a silence all round the ground much as a Wimbledon crowd quietens down before a service and Copson, ball in hand, shamble shuffles back to bowl, kicking his toe caps outwards as he goes. He turns, guard is given and a lonely Eldritch voice deep in the square leg crowd screeches up in the silence, ‘Bowell bugger, Bill.’ And Bill Copson, all fiery hair and slinging arms burns past the umpire and the middle stump, a haft first javelin, sails towards wicket-keeper Harry Elliott, standing it seems in memory, halfway to the boundary. The silence explodes.’ Of his batting Twells recalled what he called ‘an unlikely story’, as follows 43 : ‘Yes, except that it is of one stroke, against Nottinghamshire at Ilkeston. A blow, a kind of chopping shot off the back foot never before or subsequently seen, which with a cross bat, suddenly lifted a ball over the bowler’s sightscreen and the 82 Umpiring and Retirement 42 It has not been possible to identify a match with all the features described by the author. 43 This was almost certainly the match between Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire at Ilkeston in 1947, where Copson scored 22* in his side’s first innings.