Reginald Wilmot

Who is Reginald Wilmot?

Reginald William Ernest "Old Boy" Wilmot was a leading sports journalist in Melbourne, Australia in the early 20th century, well known for his writing on cricket and Australian rules football. Wilmot's writing on football and sport in general were authoritative and displayed wisdom and generosity.

Along with Hugh Buggy, R.W.E. Wilmot was believed to have coined the term 'bodyline' during the 1932/33 Ashes Test cricket series. Wilmot also wrote several books on cricket including Defending The Ashes 1932-33 which gave a rare Australian perspective on this historic and controversial series.

R.W.E. Wilmot was a student of Melbourne Grammar School. He would later be heavily involved in the organisation of amateur sport in Melbourne and often used his newspaper columns to promote the value of school sport, particularly as it was played in public schools. He supported amateurism in school sport strongly because, as he commented in an article on professional coaches in 1914, ‘the professional very often misses the spirit of sport in his desire to gain’.

His strongly held loathing of professional sport carried over to his love of football. In 1915 Wilmot, then the vice-president of the Metropolitan Amateur Football Association, used his position as the Argus's football scribe, "Old Boy", to launch an attack on the mercenary nature of professional football, arguing that professional football did not improve the calibre of man and did nothing to improve the sport and, as such, was of no value to the community.