Robert Hindley Wilkinson was an English academic, and a cricketer with amateur status who was active from 1828 to 1831.
Background
Wilkinson was born in London, the son of Robert Wilkinson and his wife Catherine Allix, daughter of John Peter Allix of Swaffham Prior. The Review Charles Allix Wilkinson, the writer, and Isaac Herbert Wilkinson were his brothers, in a family of seven brothers and three sisters.
Education
He attended Eton College and was cricket captain there in 1828.
Career
He entered King"s College, Cambridge in 1830, graduating Bachelor of Arts in 1833 and Master of Arts in 1836. He was a Fellow of King"s from 1832 to 1852, and bursar in 1846. Entering Lincoln"s Inn in 1835, he was called to the bar in 1838.
Wilkinson was a magistrate and lieutenant-colonel of militia.
He died in Hitchin, Hertfordshire. Wilkinson made his first-class debut in 1831 and appeared in one match as an unknown handedness batsman whose bowling style is unknown, playing for Cambridge University.
He scored 51 runs with a highest score of 37 and took no wickets. They had a son, Edward Obert Hindley Wilkinson, an officer of the 60th Rifles drowned after the battle of Ingogo in 1881.
Their daughter Caroline Elizabeth married Charles Poyntz Stewart.
Wilkinson was the landlord of a house named Rooksnest near Chesfield Park, on Weston Road, Stevenage, rented between 1883 and 1893 by the author East. M. Forster and his mother Lily. They had to leave, unwillingly, when the Poyntz Stewarts, to whom the property had passed, wished it vacated. Forster had written a piece about the house, the "Rooksnest memoir", by 1894, when he was 15.
And it mentions Wilkinson as landlord.
Howards End (1910) was his novel about his childhood home. He continued to visit the house into the later 1940s, and he retained the furniture all his life.
From 1913 Elizabeth Poston lived there: the Forsters had known the Poston family when they were the residents. The memoir was published with the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Howards End.
Another memoir by Forster, from the 1940s and about West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer in Surrey which was his home from 1925, returns to the associations of Rooksnest.
Rooksnest, now called Rook"s Nest House, had once been named Howards. lieutenant became a Grade I listed building in 1976.