William Patterson (cricketer, born 1854)

William Seeds Patterson (19 March 1854 – 20 October 1939) was an English cricketer who played first-class cricket for Cambridge University, Lancashire and various amateur teams between 1874 and 1882.[1] He was born at Mossley Hill, Liverpool and died at Hook Heath, Woking, Surrey.[2]

Patterson was educated at Uppingham School, where he was captain of the cricket eleven and was coached by the famous cricketer H. H. Stephenson, and Trinity College, Cambridge.[3] As a cricketer, he was a right-handed middle order batsman and a right-arm slow bowler.[1] At Cambridge, he made an early impression as a batsman by scoring 147 in the freshmen's trial match of 1874.[4] That brought him into the university first eleven for much of the summer, playing largely as a batsman, often opening the innings, and he scored 86 in his third game, the home match against Surrey.[5] But he lost form and was not in the side for the 1874 University Match against Oxford University; he was also not successful in a couple of matches for Lancashire later in the season.[1]

Greater use was made in 1875 of Patterson's bowling, and he was also more consistent as a batsman, playing as a middle- or lower-order batsman; in the University Match, he took three Oxford wickets in each innings and scored 12 and 18, but Cambridge lost the match by just six runs.[6] There was further improvement in both batting and bowling in 1876. Against the Gentlemen of England side, in a 12-a-side match, he took 11 wickets in the match with 7 for 64 in the first innings.[7] In the 1876 University Match, Patterson shared the first-innings wickets with his Uppingham School fast-bowling colleague, Henry Luddington, taking five for 42, and then scored an unbeaten 105 in the Cambridge innings, for less than a day the highest innings in the University Match series – Oxford's captain William Game scored 109 in his second innings – and the only century of Patterson's first-class career.[8] He was then picked for the Gentlemen side in the Gentlemen v Players match at Prince's Cricket Ground, where he took seven wickets (though W. G. Grace took 10).[9] By the end of the season, in only eight first-class games, Patterson had taken 52 wickets.[1]

Patterson was one of the leading bowlers of the 1877 season, taking 80 wickets in 11 first-class games.[1] He was captain of the Cambridge University team and again shared Oxford's first-innings wickets with Luddington in the University Match, though an innings of 117 not out by Francis Buckland won the game easily for Oxford.[10] There were five players from Uppingham School in the Cambridge team under Patterson, all of whom had been coached by Stephenson: The Times in its obituary of Patterson in 1939 wrote that, though Eton, Harrow or Winchester might have supplied this number of cricketers to a university team in the early days of the University Match, "since the game became more generally known and played by the public schools, this record has not been equalled".[11] At the end of the Cambridge term, Patterson played twice in Gentlemen v Players matches. In the second of these, at Lord's, he took seven Players' wickets for 58 runs in the first innings and then, batting at No 11 in a very strong batting line-up, joined Fred Grace with nine Gentlemen wickets down for 97 runs and a further 46 required for victory: Grace scored 23 and Patterson 24, both not out, to secure the win "amid great applause".[11]

After graduating from Cambridge in 1877, Patterson went into business and had little time for cricket; he later served on the Mersey Docks and Harbour Board.[3] He played a few matches for Lancashire in 1877, 1878 and 1882, a couple in Philadelphia in 1880 and 1881 and one for Liverpool and District in 1882; thereafter there were minor matches in Liverpool and in the United States up to 1888.[1] In later life, he wrote a history of cricket at Uppingham School.[3]