William Cobbold - Other Sports and Later Life

Other Sports and Later Life

Although regarded by his friend G.O. Smith as scarcely in the first rank of cricketers, Cobbold played once for Kent, scoring four runs, and, after his retirement from football, persisted with cricket and took up golf. Playing against lesser opposition "Nuts" could be a formidable batsman; the first wicket partnership of 440 runs he notched with WR Gray for West Wratting, a small village in Cambridgeshire, against Fitzwilliam Hostel in 1891 remains, more than a century later, among the ten highest ever recorded in minor cricket.

In later life he was a schoolteacher, working principally as a "crammer" who specialised in preparing boys for entrance to the British Army. Cobbold suffered considerably from ill health in the years leading to his death - problems his obituarist attributed to his capacity for sheer hard work. He died at West Wratting.