Cricket's Historians

The Cricketer Magazine what sort of history Ashley-Cooper might have written. He was the fount of knowledge behind a number of pre-war books dealing with specific aspects of cricket’s history – his work on the Kent history is an excellent example. In 1920 Ashley-Cooper had been appointed Secretary of Nottinghamshire C.C.C., a disastrous appointment, but out of it did come his only full length county history – that on Nottinghamshire, published in 1923. The book was about the same length as Altham’s work, but much drier, not to say rather stodgy. As one would expect, Ashley-Cooper’s Nottinghamshire contains a mass of previously unpublished detail (in complete contrast to Altham’s book). The 1920s was the golden age of Ashley-Cooper. No other contemporary historian/statistician held such an elevated reputation and indeed merited it. In my opinion his outstanding book of the decade was his annotated reprint of Pycroft’s The Cricket Field . This was published by St James’s Press Co.Ltd in 1922. I haven’t performed an exact word count, but Ashley-Cooper’s erudite notes are possibly as long as the original book. The work begins with a ten-page essay that places Pycroft in the context of his time. There are, in addition, over 30 full page illustrations. Another worthwhile volume from Ashley-Cooper’s pen was Cricket Highways and Byways published by George Allen & Unwin in 1927. It is a collection of essays and included among them is ‘A Girdle Round the Earth’ which gave the origins of cricket in virtually every country where the game was known to have been played. It was only superseded as late as 2009, with the publication of Martin Wilson’s First Cricket In , which listed the earliest references to the game in each county and country. A year after Ashley-Cooper’s annotated The Cricket Field , he tackled the history of Hambledon by using two original manuscripts, one being the Hambledon Club Minute Book and the second the Club’s Accounts. These he reprinted, adding biographies of both theHambledon players and members, as well as an historical essay and a list of the 105 ‘Hambledon’ matches, with notes and reference to Haygarth’s Scores & Biographies for readers wanting the full scorecards. Ashley-Cooper employed the match titles as given in Haygarth in order to arrive at his total of 105. 103