William Aldwin Soames (10 July 1850 – 27 December 1916) was an English

cricket 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 striki ...

er. Soames was a right-handed batsman. He was born at

Brighton Brighton () is a seaside resort and one of the two main areas of the City of Brighton and Hove in the county of East Sussex, England. It is located south of London. Archaeological evidence of settlement in the area dates back to the Bronze A ...

Sussex Sussex (), from the Old English (), is a historic county in South East England that was formerly an independent medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom. It is bounded to the west by Hampshire, north by Surrey, northeast by Kent, south by the English ...

, and was educated at Brighton College, which his father, William Aldwin Soames, had founded in 1845, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. Soames made his first-class debut for

against Hampshire at the Green Jackets Ground, Winchester, in 1875. He made two further first-class appearances for the county in 1875, against Hampshire at the County Ground, Hove, and Gloucestershire at the College Ground, Cheltenham. In his three first-class matches for the county, he scored 17 runs at an average of 3.40, with a high score of 17. His 17 runs all came in the first-innings of his first match against Hampshire, thereafter he failed to score in four consecutive innings. According to ''Scores and Biographies'', " eis a good average bat and fields well at long-leg or cover-point." He died at Bank station in the City of London on 27 December 1916. His brother, Henry, played first-class cricket for Hampshire.

Career and family

William Aldwin Soames was a solicitor with the firm of Soames & Thompson, of London. He acquired the estate at Moor Park, Farnham, Surrey. His father had been a prosperous Russian merchant and partner in Wilkie & Soames, soap makers. He married (Caroline) Louisa Jackson,Nicholas Mander, ''Borromean Rings: genealogy of the Mander Family'', Owlpen Press, 2011 the daughter of a Manchester merchant, by whom he had nine children, including Jack Soames, of Bergeret, Nanyuki, Kenya (today the Soames Hotel), a notorious member of the Happy Valley set who was called as a witness in the Lord Erroll murder trial.

References

External links

William Soames
at ESPNcricinfo
William Soames
at CricketArchive {{DEFAULTSORT:Soames, William 1850 births 1916 deaths Sportspeople from Brighton People educated at Brighton College English cricketers Sussex cricketers