William Prince was an English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 cricket

Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of 11 players on an oval-shaped field, at the centre of which is a rectangular 22-yard long pitch. One team bats, trying to score as many runs as possible while the other team bowls and fields, trying to dismiss the batsmen and thus limit the...

er who played first-class cricket

First-class cricket

First-class cricket is a class of cricket that consists of matches of three or more days' scheduled duration, that are between two sides of eleven players and are officially adjudged first-class by virtue of the standard of the competing teams...

 for Derbyshire

Derbyshire County Cricket Club

Derbyshire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 major county clubs which make up the England and Wales domestic cricket structure, representing the historic county of Derbyshire...

 in 1898.

Prince was born in Somercotes

Somercotes

Somercotes is a village and Parish in the District of Amber Valley in the English county of Derbyshire, close to the border with Nottinghamshire. It is a former mining village and was once surrounded by more than five pits. It is now one of the fastest developing villages in the Amber Valley area,...

, Derbyshire

Derbyshire

Derbyshire is a county in the East Midlands of England. A substantial portion of the Peak District National Park lies within Derbyshire. The northern part of Derbyshire overlaps with the Pennines, a famous chain of hills and mountains. The county contains within its boundary of approx...

, the son of Thomas Prince, a coal miner, and his wife Hannah. In 1881 the family was living at Skegby

Skegby

Skegby is a small village in the Ashfield district of Nottinghamshire, England, located two miles west of Mansfield and one mile north of Sutton-in-Ashfield, close to Stanton Hill lying on the B6014 road. Skegby sits on both sides of a deep valley near the source of the River Meden...

, Nottingham and Prince himself was a miner at the age of 13.

Prince, with fellow one-timer John Bourne

John Bourne (cricketer)

John James Bourne was an English cricketer who played first-class cricket for Derbyshire in 1898.Bourne was born at Moira, Leicestershire, the son of Thomas Bourne, a colliery manager and his wife Rose...

, played one match for Derbyshire in the 1898 season

Derbyshire County Cricket Club in 1898

Derbyshire Country Cricket Club in 1898 was the cricket season when the English club Derbyshire had been playing for twenty-seven years. It was their fourth season in the County Championship and they won three matches to finish ninth in the Championship table.-1898 season:Derbyshire played...

 in July against Nottinghamshire

Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club

Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club is one of the 18 major county clubs which make up the English and Welsh domestic cricket structure, representing the historic county of Nottinghamshire, and the current county champions. Its limited overs team is called the Nottinghamshire Outlaws...

. A right-arm medium-fast bowler, Prince was given little chance to bowl and took no wickets, but conceded just thirteen from nine overs, the best runs-per-over rate for the team during the entire match. He was a right-handed batsman and as a tailender, put on two runs in the first innings and did not bat in the second innings as the match finished as a draw.

Prince died in New Ollerton at the age of 80.