 After Gilbert's retirement, and even following his death, controversy remained attached to his name; there seemed to be a conspiracy of silence surrounding his fate. Cricket historians rarely mentioned him, despite his varied career. W. G. Grace, although including Gilbert in an appendix of leading batsmen in his 1891 book Cricket, did not include him in the text at all, despite the book's more than 400 pages; in his Cricketers I Have Met, Grace described 121 cricketers but did not mention his cousin. Further evidence of Gilbert's disgrace came in the pages of Wisden. Although Gilbert began as an amateur cricketer, which entitled him to have "Mr." before his name in the "Births and Deaths" section, he was referred to until his death as "Gilbert, W. R.", which denoted a professional. However, in his Wisden obituary he received the title "Mr. W. R. Gilbert", even though the "Births and Deaths" still listed him as a professional, and in 1935 he was once again restored to amateur status in "Births and Deaths", for reasons which are unclear. The same obituary glossed over Gilbert's enforced retirement from cricket, simply observing: "At the beginning of 1886 he became a professional, and the season was not far advanced before his career in first-class cricket ended abruptly. He then left England for Canada." Even in 1970, the silence continued; historian Rowland Bowen wrote about the story but concluded by saying: "Another indication of the recurring instinct for suppression was a suggestion to me that if this story had not appeared in print before (it has not) it should not now." It is not clear who made this suggestion, whether it was descendants of the Grace family, a cricket administrator or someone else. It was not until 1984 that the full story was published by historian Robert Brook. In reviewing what he considered to be the injustice of the case, and reflecting on Gilbert's success in Canada, Green wrote: "No wonder that those responsible for this act of appalling cruelty went to such fatuous lengths to keep its details a secret."
