The Dream That Died: Gwilym Rowland and Welsh Cricket
Martin Chandler |Published: 2025
Pages: 191
Author: Hignell, Andrew
Publisher: ACS
Rating: 4 stars
Andrew Hignell has, amongst other roles, the task of managing the Museum of Welsh Cricket at Sophia Gardens. He has written many previous books, almost all of which are concerned with cricket in Wales. To use a well worked cliche I am confident that he has forgotten more about Welsh cricket than I have ever known.
But he admits in his foreword that for years the subject matter of this book was something about which he knew little more than the basics. I can well imagine therefore the adrenalin rush he must have experienced when a descendant of Gwilym Rowland made available to the museum an extensive personal archive.
And an excellent book has been the result. This would have been an interesting enough story if it was just concerned with the cricketing aspects of Rowland’s life. As it is though his remarkable back story further illuminates a narrative that no one who picks this book up will have any significant prior knowledge of.
Essentially the book is a biography of Rowland. Born in Manchester in 1876 he was an intelligent man who initially found success in life by understanding the tax system. From there he joined and headed a major agricultural machinery conglomerate. By then he had relocated to North Wales and it was his desire to establish the game there that is the central theme of The Dream That Died.
The cricketing story of Gwilym Rowland unfolds in the 1920s. His aim was to create a Welsh national team, something that, if not to the full extent of his ambitions, he succeeded in doing. There was however an always uneasy and often difficult relationship with the south of the country, Glamorgan having become, in 1921, the seventeenth First Class county.
There were also frustrations in Rowland’s failure to persuade the 1926 and 1930 Australians to visit North Wales, but he had more success with other tourists and the MCC. The whole story is contained in the huge volume of correspondence that Rowland’s great grandson made available. That that is the source is crucial because such is the detail in the letters that they give up much of Rowland’s character, something it would be very difficult to capture otherwise given that there is no one alive today who knew him.
The bare bones of Rowland’s achievements in the world of cricket exist in the scorecards that can be found on Cricketarchive, but they offer no context. The correspondence does, but it all ends in 1932. It was then that the mighty Rowland suffered a setback he never got over. The vast business that he presided over, which in truth seems never to have been built on solid foundations, crashed and burned.
The sad, but unsurprising aspect of the story is that after that business failure Williams was a broken man and, in 1938, he was found dead in a ditch near his home on Anglesey. No obituaries appeared and, I assume, the cause of death is, as are any details of the last few years of Rowland’s life, lost. That is a little frustrating for Hignell’s reader but, perhaps, that is just as well.
Rowland had two sons and two daughters. Both sons played some First Class cricket for the teams their father was involved with. The elder, Bill, had a breakdown and was, in similar circumstances to his father, dead at 38. Cyril was the better cricketer, qualified as a barrister and then went into insurance. His son David was also involved in insurance, rebuilding Lloyds of London from its crisis in the 1990s and in time was knighted for his services to the industry.
The Dream That Died is highly recommended. Its cricketing content may be a touch niche, but the overall story is of much broader interest and one that I much enjoyed.
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