Lives in Cricket No 6 - Bill Copson

From a Derbyshire mining village, where his childhood dinners ‘were fewer than his dinnertimes’, Bill Copson came to cricket an odd way. At eighteen he had scarcely played the game. Mucking about on the ‘local rec’ while on strike with other coalminers in 1926, he found he could bowl fast and straight. From this late start he gradually raised his game to county standard. In 1936 he was the ‘strike’ bowler whose wickets helped a Derbyshire team of ‘local heroes’ to the County Championship, for the first and only time. Like his successor Les Jackson, Copson’s Test matches were few and far between. And, like his contemporaries, his playing career would have reached its zenith during the Second World War. Instead he scattered the stumps of batsmen big and small in the Bradford League, at the time the most competitive cricket in England, working during the week in a munitions factory. Kit Bartlett here charts the details of the playing and umpiring life of a reticent man, who once walked away from onlookers after he had rescued a child from a canal. Bill Copson More Than Miner Interest KIT BARTLETT LIVES IN CRICKET ACS PUBLICATIONS £10.00