‘This article first appeared in the ‘Southern Highlands Newsletter’ no. 234 July-September 2019 and is reprinted by kind permission’.
DOCTOR W. CAMAC WILKINSON. Victorian polymath: scholar, doctor, politician, cricketer by James Rodgers
On Friday, 16 October 1885, elections for the NSW Legislative Assembly began at 8.00am. The Assembly consisted of 122 Members. Conducting the election continued over the next two weeks in different electorates across NSW. This was the last NSW election in which there was no recognisable party structure. Subsequent governments were largely determined by a coalition of loose factions.
In Glebe there were two polling places - Glebe Town Hall in St John’s Road and the Central Police Court. Only adult male British subjects natural born were eligible to vote. Numbers at the polling places were large early as workers needed to cast their votes before 9.00. The second concentration of voting was during the lunch hour from 1.00.
That day 1,956 men cast their votes. Though voting was not compulsory, 60 per cent of those eligible exercised their right to send two representatives to Parliament for the first time since Glebe was first created as a municipality in 1859.
Four candidates stood in Glebe. They were not chosen by any party. They nominated, volunteers to serve without remuneration, imbued with a sense of duty and obligation and responsibility. They addressed meetings of the citizens in the Glebe Town Hall in the days leading up to the election.
The candidates were a builder, a retired oil colour man (a now obsolete trade indicating someone in paint manufacturing), a journalist and a medical doctor.
One candidate stood out. William Camac Wilkinson was easily the youngest at 28 years of age. He was the only one born in Australia; the only one unmarried; and the only one tertiary educated.
A rigorous and privileged education had left him intellectually precocious. He had been captain of Sydney Grammar School in 1874, matriculating in first place among Grammar students to the University of Sydney. In three years as an undergraduate, he won scholarships, medals and honours in Classics and Natural Science.
Wilkinson had travelled to England to study medicine at the University College of London. He graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine (1882) and a Doctor of Medicine (1884) before postgraduate studies in Europe.
By October 1885, Dr Wilkinson had recently arrived home. He had just taken up appointment at the University of Sydney as a lecturer in Pathology and was living in the family home Hereford House in Glebe Point Road. He was undoubtedly a member of what Manning Clark called “the comfortable classes”, descended from a naval captain in the British East India Company, Captain Henry Richard Wilkinson and son of a NSW District Court Judge, William Hattam Wilkinson (1831-1908) who had emigrated to Australia in 1852.
When the results for Glebe were declared, Wilkinson surprisingly came in first. Others had been favoured. John Meeks was a Glebe alderman, Michael Chapman had been Mayor of Glebe. In a first-past-the-post election, the results were: William Wilkinson 1102, John Meeks 1069, Michael Chapman 815, William Bailey 312. Wilkinson and Meeks were declared elected.
Glebe (‘The Glebe’), once the home of the Wangal clan, was appropriated by Governor Arthur Phillip in 1789. He granted 400 acres to NSW’s first chaplain, Reverend Richard Johnson. In 1885, its leafy surrounds were home to the gentry. The Wilkinson family, resident since the 1870s, was well known.
Dr Wilkinson had certain Victorian values impressed upon him by his family and by his Headmaster at Sydney Grammar, the formidable AB Weigall. He brought his own developed sense of duty and responsibility - talents were to be cultivated for the benefit of others, not yourself. Representation in government was seen as a service. Wealth and position were a means, not an end.
In the Parliament, Wilkinson was a member of various committees and he served diligently.
By the time the Glebe voters went to the polls again on Saturday 5 September 1887 to elect the members of the 13th NSW Parliament, candidates were representing political parties for the first time. Sir Henry Parkes (Free Trade) had been Premier for only a week before the old Parliament was dissolved. The Free Traders were victorious, having secured 79 of the 124 seats.
In Glebe, five candidates stood - four Free Traders and one Protectionist. Glebe remained a two-Member constituency.
Dr Wilkinson had joined the Free Trade Association and held their endorsement. With Michael Chapman, both representing the Free Trade Party, the sitting Members were re-elected. Of those eligible 67 per cent voted.
The result was: William Wilkinson 1332, Michael Chapman 1261, John Meeks 503, William Bailey 384, S.A. Byrne (Protectionist) 225.
Meeks was not happy with the result. He intended petitioning for a scrutiny of his votes which he claimed were very much understated. Nothing came of this.
At the next election, in January 1889, Wilkinson decided not to recontest his seat. He was giving lectures at the University of Sydney, engaged in honorary practice at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He had founded the District Nursing Association and the Queen Victoria Home for Consumptives. He toured Germany and Austria in 1891 where he met Robert Koch, the German physician who identified the specific causative agents of tuberculosis (consumption). Koch was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1905.
In 1892 Wilkinson married Jessie Jane Cruickshank. A son, Alexander, was born the same year. Alexander became a decorated war hero who played 89 first-class cricket games, mainly in England, until he was 47.
Marriage brought Dr Wilkinson close to politics again. Jessie’s brother was George Alexander Cruickshank (1853-1904), banker and landowner, Member for Inverell in the NSW Parliament for 12 years (1889-1901). In the first Federal Parliament of 1901, he was elected Member for Gwydir in a comprehensive victory for the Protectionist Party.
Wilkinson put himself forward one more time and was elected for Belmore in the Sydney City Council elections of 1902.
In 1908 he represented the Australasian Olympic team’s interests in the London Games Management Committee before moving to London and opening a practice in Harley Street. For most of the rest of his life, he lived in London, increasingly renowned for his treatment and cure of those suffering from tuberculosis. He was one of the first Australians admitted to the Royal College of Physicians. When Jessie died in 1929, he married Dulcie Dey Fry (1893-1972).
If that was all that he ever did, it would have been a fulfilling, generous life.
How many of his students, his patients, his colleagues and his constituents knew that his cricket career provided a fascinating footnote in the history of Australian cricket?
He was a talented sportsman: one of the rugby players at Sydney University in 1875, one of the founders of the University Athletics Club, a batsman of some skill in the University sides of 1874-75, 1875-76 and 1876-77.
As noted earlier, in 1878 he was in England, between finishing his BA at Sydney University and enrolling in medical studies in London.
In that English summer (much diluted by wet weather) the first white Australian cricket team to tour the United Kingdom played 41 games. None of the games are now termed as Test matches. It was a team of only 12 players, captained by Dave Gregory and managed by John Conway. When W.G. Grace “kidnapped” the English born Billy Midwinter early in the tour so that Midwinter could play for Grace’s Gloucestershire, the Australians had only eleven players for their remaining matches.
Consequently Conway (who played ten games for Victoria) and six others played for the Australians at various stages. One of those six was W.C. Wilkinson. A possible connection was Tom Garrett with whom Wilkinson had played for Sydney University as an undergraduate.
Whatever the circumstances of Wilkinson’s appearance for the Australians, against the West of Scotland in Glasgow on 13-14 September, he was caught for a duck, batting at number 10, and may have thought that he would be needed no more. The game finished early on the second day and another game was hastily organised. Wilkinson scored 8 before the Australians had to leave for Sunderland, 210 km away.
They played a two-day game against the Eighteen of Sunderland and collapsed twice (77 and 58) in showery weather to lose by 71 runs. Garrett took 11 for 28 in Sunderland’s first innings. Wilkinson made 2 and 5 not out. His three games for Australia had realised 15 runs and no wickets. On the 1880 tour, he again filled in when the Australians played The Players and made 19 not out.
While studying in London, his cricket ability created interest in Middlesex County. In 1881 he became the first Australian-born to play county cricket. In limited appearances, he headed the Middlesex batting and bowling averages. He made 41 against Yorkshire at Lords (just down the road from where his father had been born 50 years before) against four England Test bowlers. An innings of 52 against Oxford University drew praise for his vigorous hitting. His right arm medium pacers took four wickets.
He appears to have played little cricket over the next decade. Just after his election for Glebe, he opened the batting in the annual Parliament vs Press game at the Domain in February 1886 and made 31 against the Press side captained by the manager of the 1878 team, John Conway. He then played a few games for the Union Club in 1886-87 and in occasional friendly fixtures (v Combined GPS, v Newcastle).
Quite unexpectedly, on 19 April 1896, he resumed his career with Sydney University with whom he’d last played as an undergraduate almost 20 years previously. Again, the connection appears to have been with Tom Garrett, the 37-year-old venerable former Test player who had played with Wilkinson in the 1870s and who had been in the Australian team when Wilkinson filled in during 1878.
These were hard times for the Sydney University club. The undergraduates struggled. Veterans in the 1st Grade side were fading. Five players were unavailable for the final match of the 1895-96 season. So, at 38 years of age, balding, with a luxuriant moustache, Wilkinson went in first with Garrett against Glebe at University Oval. Glebe was in first place, University last and Glebe won the game by 197 runs. Garrett and Wilkinson put on 60 but they had little support. Wilkinson’s 58 was a bright feature of University’s dismal batting.
The next season, 1896-97, Wilkinson was persuaded to play another six games. The University 1st Grade team was top-heavy with players whose golden years were long behind them, even though three of them were former Test players. The younger players achieved little.
In his final 1st Grade game for University, 22 years after his first, Wilkinson scored a memorable 83 not out and University had a rare convincing win by 151 runs.
Again, unexpectedly, when he was in England touring in 1899, he played nine non-1st-class games for MCC. Wilkinson had been a member of MCC for over 50 years. He was summoned again to play one more 1st-class game for Mr Webb’s XI against Oxford University. He was now 41 and his comeback realised just two runs in his two innings.
When he died in London in 1940, aged 88, Wilkinson had lived an exemplary life of generous service. He was a pioneer in medicine. When he was needed, he represented the people of Glebe. He came to the aid of his cricket club and, in a few sodden days in 1878, his countrymen.
