Alfred Williams Killed at Loos — Tasmanian All-Rounder, September 1915

Williams played a handful of first-class matches for Tasmania in the years before the war. He worked as a clerk in Hobart before enlisting.

He joined the AIF as a private in 1915 and was sent to France with one of the early Australian infantry drafts.

Williams was one of more than two hundred first-class cricketers — Australian, English, South African and others — killed in the First World War. Like many young men of cricketing background, he had given up the game when he enlisted in 1914-15. By September 1915 his unit was in France and he was killed during one of the supporting actions to the Battle of Loos. His name appears on the Tasmanian war memorial and on Wisden's lengthy 1916 and 1917 lists of cricketers killed. The detailed records of state cricketers from the period are thinner than the Test ones — many men who had played a single Sheffield Shield match were lost without a Wisden obituary line, and Williams' scattered first-class career is among the harder ones to reconstruct.

“Cricket has lost a host of promising young players whose names will only be known to a few.”

His name is recorded among Tasmanian war dead and on the Wisden cricketers' obituary list. The full circumstances of his death were not preserved in detail.