Sadly, in February 2008 Rowington Cricket Club lost two long standing supporters, Val Jay and Bill Sly. Obituaries for both appeared in the local newspaper and these are reproduced below, courtesy of The Stratford Herald.

Val Jay

"Rowington Cricket Club was in mourning last week after the death of their 1st team tea lady, Val Jay, after a short battle against cancer.

Val was closely connected to the club for more than six decades with her father, Wilf, and brothers, Tony and Nigel, all playing for the club while Val was the scorer. Her own sons Steve (Ginger) and Simon (Sam) also played for the club, with Steve still a first team regular to this day.

Val's sumptuous teas gained a reputation around the Cotswold Hills League and many a team fielding second were left rather sluggish as a result of Val’s fine fare!

She will be sadly missed by all visiting cricket teams and followers and by all at Rowington Cricket Club. A memorial service will be held at Rowington Church and afterwards at Rowington Club. All donations to Macmillan Nurses which can be made c/o Rowington Club."

Bill Sly

"The funeral of one of South Warwickshire’s leading personalities in club cricket takes place on Thursday 28th February. William (Bill) Sly died peacefully at his home in St Laurence Close, Rowington, aged 77. He leaves his wife of 44 years, Dorothy, and four children. Mr Sly's funeral will be held at Robin Hood Cemetery, Solihull followed by a memorial service at St Laurence Church, Rowington.

“Young” Bill’s style as captain in the mid-1960s was thoughtful and deliberate. He was always quick to set an example of skill and steady enthusiasm in batting, bowling and fielding. He encouraged the talented, and was kind to rabbits but only so long as they made an effort. He could be crisp with the careless and famously gruff when necessary, but always wholehearted in the enjoyment of company afterwards.

The services will be conducted by Kemble Everitt, one of the club’s batsmen and bowlers (five centuries overall and first to score 1,000 runs in the 1962 season), who is now a licensed Reader. Mr Everitt recalled how Bill would station himself at silly mid-off and “give the batsman the eye”. And that was before the term sledging was invented. He also told how Bill and Dorothy set off on their honeymoon, but the next day he insisted on going to see how the team was getting on. “I was furious” said Dorothy. Bill’s best man was George Beardsmore of Hatton. He and the Slys remained lifelong friends with George being Godfather to their children. He is now 86, and had a stroke two years ago. Bill would help him to walk and used to drive him about.

The chairman of the club, Brian Taylor of Rowington, said: “Bill Sly will be greatly missed as one of the village’s stalwart characters as well as for his work with the cricket club. We still have four Slys playing for the club: Bill’s sons William and Graham, who is currently one of our captains, and his nephews Mark and Colin. The connection with the family has been continuous and goes back more than a century to when the club began in 1887. Two Slys are known to have played for Rowington in 1888 against Earlswood, which fielded five of my own ancestors, the Hunts”. In addition, another of Bill’s nephews, Jonathan, has also played for Rowington.

The 1888 match produced the club’s earliest recorded result, but not a happy one: Rowington all out for 14 in reply to Earlswood’s 62. But more than a century later Graham Sly made up for it and achieved national fame playing against Henley by hitting six sixes in one over, unknown in the UK since Gary Sobers performed the feat when playing for Nottinghamshire against Glamorgan in Swansea in 1968.

Later team sheets have listed three Sly brothers at once: Bill, Eric the bowler and the late Norman as wicketkeeper. Their father, as groundsman from the early ‘30s, would have prepared the wicket they played on. Bill won the cup for bowling in 1959, 1961 and 1962. Eric was also a notable trophy winner and both had trials for Warwickshire.

Bill Sly was reverent towards cricket – he was an honorary life member of the club – but he was also passionate about his gardening, having taken up the craft when he left school. For many years he was noted for runner bean growing and he achieved the village championship and the Amateur Gardening medal for an 18-inch specimen. A thief once stole almost all his crops on the eve of the show, but his wife Dorothy managed to salvage enough for his entry. In fact, Bill would usually bring his harvest home and leave it to her to choose the nine required.

Bill had a wry sense of humour and a taste for a practical joke. Dorothy told how these had come together when a rival gardener in a neighbouring village woke up to find a prodigiously long bean in his row. Bill and one of his friends had carefully stitched two together and tied them to a plant in the middle of the night.

After gardening, and when he was old enough, Bill drove lorries for Benford Engineering of Warwick for 30 years, delivering machinery to docks, building sites, farms and other customers all over the UK. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the country and held every available vehicle licence. He would often be at the wheel of a low-loader going at a stately pace with a police escort. He was made redundant before Benford’s Warwick plant closed and he worked for C. Curtiss and Sons, timber merchants of Lapworth, where the late Neil Curtiss was the cricket club’s fixture secretary.

Bill’s family has always taken pride in the connection it has, through its name, to the world of William Shakespeare. The actor William Sly held shares in the Globe Theatre, and his portrait in Hall’s Croft, Stratford, bears a strong likeness to Bill Sly. He was a member of the Chamberlain’s Men with Shakespeare, whose rascally character Christopher Sly in the Induction of The Taming of the Shrew proclaims with indignant pride: “. . . the Slys are no rogues; look in the Chronicles; we came in with Richard Conqueror”.

Bill Sly was also a proud committee member for the annual Rowington ex-Service Supper for which he ran the bar, reflecting perhaps his lifelong enthusiasm for socialising around the pubs of the village and those of its neighbours fortunate enough to have a cricket club!"