Catalogue for the auction of
Cricket, Football & Sporting Memorabilia

To be held on Friday, Saturday & Sunday
31st October, 1st & 2nd November 2025

William Henry Cooper. Victoria & Australia 1878-1885. Very rare single page handwritten letter from Cooper, written on ruled paper, dated ‘Sept 15th [1936]’. Cooper is writing to ‘Mr. Hill’, being Les R. Hill, the cricket writer and collector base in Mount Gambier, South Australia. Cooper writes, ‘At 87 I am granted wonderfully good health’ and while he ‘cannot do anything in the way of cricket except looking at cricket’ he looks forward ‘to see something good in a short time’, presumably referring to the impending 1936/37 Ashes series, but thinks ‘I don’t think we are going to have it all our way’. Cooper closes by saying he is sending this letter ‘to Mr. Gautier[?] as you do not give your Adelaide address’. Nicely signed, ‘W.H. Cooper’. Horizontal and vertical folds with splitting to folds, small losses to corners, otherwise in good condition. A very rare signature of an early Australian Test cricketer.
William Cooper was born in Maidstone, Kent in 1849. His family emigrated to Australia when he was aged eight. He didn’t start playing cricket until he was 27 following advice from a doctor to get more exercise. A leg-spinner, he made his first-class debut for Victoria in 1879 against Lord Harris’ England touring side and took 5/79 in the first innings, and played two Test matches for Australia in the 1881/82 and 1884/85 Ashes series. He was selected for the Australian tour to England in 1884 but injured his spinning finger on the voyage out and was only able to play in five of the first-class matches and no Tests. He died in 1939 in Malvern, Melbourne. Les R. Hill was a bookseller and collector in Mount Gambier, South Australia, who in 1974 published ‘Australian Cricketers On Tour 1868-1974’, a record of all Australian tours abroad, and also privately published biographies of Australian Test players including Bill Whitty and Arthur Richardson.

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