William Prest
English cricketer and footballer (1832-1885)
William Prest (1 April 1832 – 10 February 1885) was an English cricketer and footballer born in York. He lived most of his life in Sheffield where he went on to become co-founder of Sheffield Football Club and captained Sheffield Cricket Club (aka Yorkshire). He was also involved with the formation of a local regiment, the Hallamshire Rifles, with which he served for most of his life.
William was son of John and Arabella Prest and moved with them to Sheffield when his brother John Beevor Prest bought a wine business. There he became a noted cricketer and played for Sheffield 16 times between 1852 and 1862. He scored 286 runs at an average of 10.21 as a batter and got a total of 3 wickets for 69 runs as a bowler. All 3 wickets came in the same match.
In the winter of 1854, Prest attended the meeting at the Adelphi Hotel in Arundel Gate when the Sheffield Cricket Club agreed to lease a new ground from the Duke of Norfolk next to Bramall Lane.
He also played for "The Eleven" against "The Twenty-two" in the first cricket match at the venue on 30 April 1855. He was bowled out by Joseph Rowbotham in the first innings without scoring a run and thus became the first player to score a duck at the ground.
“William Prest” enters the record as english cricketer and footballer (1832-1885). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what William, Prest and English can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“William Prest” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, William, Prest and English provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4020127. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1832, 1885, 1852 and 1862.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Prest” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.