Alfred Williams, a Tasmanian all-rounder who had played first-class cricket for the state before the war and enlisted with the AIF, was among the earliest Australian first-class cricketers to be killed on the Western Front, falling in action in late September 1915. He was in his late twenties.
Williams played a handful of first-class matches for Tasmania in the years before the war. He worked as a clerk in Hobart before enlisting.
He joined the AIF as a private in 1915 and was sent to France with one of the early Australian infantry drafts.
Williams was one of more than two hundred first-class cricketers — Australian, English, South African and others — killed in the First World War. Like many young men of cricketing background, he had given up the game when he enlisted in 1914-15. By September 1915 his unit was in France and he was killed during one of the supporting actions to the Battle of Loos. His name appears on the Tasmanian war memorial and on Wisden's lengthy 1916 and 1917 lists of cricketers killed. The detailed records of state cricketers from the period are thinner than the Test ones — many men who had played a single Sheffield Shield match were lost without a Wisden obituary line, and Williams' scattered first-class career is among the harder ones to reconstruct.
Pre-1914: Plays first-class cricket for Tasmania
1915: Enlists in the AIF
Sep 1915: Killed in action on the Western Front
Pre-1914
Plays first-class cricket in Tasmania
1915
Enlists in the AIF
Sep 1915
Killed in action
“Cricket has lost a host of promising young players whose names will only be known to a few.”
His name is recorded among Tasmanian war dead and on the Wisden cricketers' obituary list. The full circumstances of his death were not preserved in detail.
One of an entire generation of Australian state cricketers wiped out by the war, with even his date of death sometimes given inconsistently in the sources.
Williams stands here for the dozens of state and shire cricketers — Australian, English county and South African provincial — whose names crowded the Wisden obituaries pages of 1916 and 1917 with little more than a date and a regiment.
Yorkshire v Essex
1932-06-16
On 15-16 June 1932 Herbert Sutcliffe (313) and Percy Holmes (224*) put on 555 for the first wicket against Essex at Leyton, breaking the world first-class record for any wicket and adding a layer of folklore — including a scoreboard that read 554 for several minutes and a hastily reversed declaration — that has clung to the partnership ever since.
Australia v England
1933-02-14
With the fate of the Bodyline series in the balance and England 216 for 6 chasing 340, Eddie Paynter checked himself out of a Brisbane hospital where he was being treated for acute tonsillitis, taxied to the Gabba in pyjamas and a dressing gown, and batted for nearly four hours to score 83. England drew level on first innings, won the Test by six wickets and the series 4-1.
Australia
1934-09-25
Days after the 1934 Oval Test, Bradman fell seriously ill with appendicitis that progressed to peritonitis. With antibiotics not yet available, he was given little chance of survival; his wife Jessie left Adelaide on a sea voyage to England prepared for the worst. He recovered after weeks of intensive nursing in a London nursing home and returned to first-class cricket the following Australian summer.