Grahame Wilshaw Parker (11 February 1912 – 11 November 1995) was an English sportsman who played

first-class cricket First-class cricket, along with List A cricket and Twenty20 cricket, is one of the highest-standard forms of cricket. A first-class match is one of three or more days' scheduled duration between two sides of eleven players each and is officiall ...

for

Gloucestershire Gloucestershire ( abbreviated Glos) is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn and the entire Forest of Dean. The county town is the city of Gl ...

and represented the

England national rugby union team The England national rugby union team represents England in men's international rugby union. They compete in the annual Six Nations Championship with France, Ireland, Italy, Scotland and Wales. England have won the championship on 29 occasion ...

. Parker, who was educated at

The Crypt School The Crypt School is a grammar school with academy status for boys and girls located in the city of Gloucester. Founded in the 16th century, it was originally an all-boys school, but it made its sixth form co-educational in the 1980s, and moved ...

, opened the batting for Gloucestershire regularly throughout the 1930s and was also a useful swing bowler. While at

Selwyn College, Cambridge Selwyn College, Cambridge (formally Selwyn College in the University of Cambridge) is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1882 by the Selwyn Memorial Committee in memory of George Augustus Selwyn (18 ...

, early in the decade, he earned blues in both cricket and rugby. He performed well for their

cricket team Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by strikin ...

in 1934 with a century against

Glamorgan , HQ = Cardiff , Government = Glamorgan County Council (1889–1974) , Origin= , Code = GLA , CodeName = Chapman code , Replace = * West Glamorgan * Mid Glamorgan * South Glamorgan , Motto ...

to go with a pair of 90s that year, one of those when he was out for 94 in the match with Oxford. He captained Cambridge University in 1935, having twice led Gloucestershire in the 1932

County Championship The County Championship (referred to as the LV= Insurance County Championship for sponsorship reasons) is the domestic first-class cricket competition in England and Wales and is organised by the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB). It bec ...

. With Gloucestershire, he had his stand-out season in 1937 when he made 662 first-class runs at an average of 44.13. Amongst his three hundreds was a first innings score of 210 against

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

at the Crabble Athletic Ground in Dover, which he followed up with bowling figures of 3/78. He had also made a century in his previous match and continued his form with 155 against

Nottinghamshire Nottinghamshire (; abbreviated Notts.) is a landlocked county in the East Midlands region of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west. The traditi ...

a week and a half after his double hundred. He was capped the first time for the national rugby union team during the

1938 Home Nations Championship The 1938 Home Nations Championship was the thirty-fourth series of the rugby union Home Nations Championship. Including the previous incarnations as the Five Nations, and prior to that, the Home Nations, this was the fifty-first series of the no ...

, when England defeated

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

36 to 14 at Lansdowne Road. Parker, playing as a full-back, contributed 15 of those points with six conversions and a penalty kick. England had been captained by Warwickshire cricketer

Peter Cranmer Peter Cranmer (10 September 1914 – 29 May 1994) was an English sportsman who captained Warwickshire in first-class cricket and earlier in his career represented England at rugby union. After World War II he gave up on rugby and focused purely ...

. He also took part in England's five-point loss to

Scotland Scotland (, ) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a border with England to the southeast and is otherwise surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the ...

at Twickenham and kicked three penalties. Following the 1938 county season, Parker joined the military and wouldn't return to cricket until 1947. During this time he served as a major in the

Royal Army Service Corps The Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) was a corps of the British Army responsible for land, coastal and lake transport, air despatch, barracks administration, the Army Fire Service, staffing headquarters' units, supply of food, water, fuel and dom ...

, seeing action in both North Africa and Italy which won him a military

MBE Mbe may refer to: * Mbé, a town in the Republic of the Congo * Mbe Mountains Community Forest, in Nigeria * Mbe language, a language of Nigeria * Mbe' language, language of Cameroon * ''mbe'', ISO 639 code for the extinct Molala language Molal ...

. This was later upgraded to an OBE following his command of the

Combined Cadet Force The Combined Cadet Force (CCF) is a youth organisation in the United Kingdom, sponsored by the Ministry of Defence (MOD), which operates in schools, and normally includes Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force sections. Its aim is to "provide a ...

Blundell's School Blundell's School is a co-educational day and boarding independent school in the English public school tradition, located in Tiverton, Devon. It was founded in 1604 under the will of Peter Blundell, one of the richest men in England at the tim ...

. He taught at Blundell's from 1946 to 1968, where he was housemaster of the Westlake boarding house from 1954, head of the geography department, and simultaneously, with Ted Crowe, was coach of the 1st XV rugby team. He struggled on his return to first-class cricket and could only manage 103 runs at 11.44 from five matches in 1947. After scoring three centuries in a month with the Gloucestershire Second XI in the 1949

Minor Counties Championship The NCCA 3 Day Championship (previously the Minor Counties Cricket Championship) is a season-long competition in England and Wales that is contested by the members of the National Counties Cricket Association (NCCA), the so-called national cou ...

, Parker was recalled into the county squad for the 1950 County Championship campaign and he made five appearances that year but just two the following season. He then captained

Devon Devon ( , historically known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South West England. The most populous settlement in Devon is the city of Plymouth, followed by Devon's county town, the city of Exeter. Devon is ...

in the Minor Counties Championship from 1953 until 1956 when he retired. Parker took over the secretary-managership of Gloucestershire County Cricket Club in 1968''

Wisden ''Wisden Cricketers' Almanack'', or simply ''Wisden'', colloquially the Bible of Cricket, is a cricket reference book published annually in the United Kingdom. The description "bible of cricket" was first used in the 1930s by Alec Waugh in a ...

'' 1996, p. 1411. and transformed the team to championship runners-up in 1969 and winners of the Gillette Cup in 1973 and the

Benson and Hedges Cup The Benson & Hedges Cup was a one-day cricket competition for first-class counties in England and Wales that was held from 1972 to 2002, one of cricket's longest sponsorship deals. It was the third major one-day competition established in Englan ...

in 1977. In 1986 and 1987 he served as the club's president. The sports hall at the Crypt School is named after him.

References

External links

*
Scrum: Grahame Parker
{{DEFAULTSORT:Parker, Grahame 1912 births 1995 deaths Alumni of Selwyn College, Cambridge British Army personnel of World War II Cambridge University cricketers Cambridge University R.U.F.C. players Cricketers from Gloucester Devon cricket captains Devon cricketers England international rugby union players English cricketers English rugby union players Gentlemen cricketers English men's footballers Gloucester City A.F.C. players Gloucestershire County RFU players Gloucestershire cricketers Officers of the Order of the British Empire People educated at The Crypt School, Gloucester Royal Army Service Corps officers Rugby union players from Gloucester Men's association football players not categorized by position