Cricket's Historians

The Cricketer Magazine Secretary, he retired to a cottage in Milford, near Godalming and in his own words: ‘I go into my study after breakfast and except for an interval for lunch of about an hour I work all day. It is a great delight to me.’ Apart from his books, he wrote two or three historical or statistical signed articles each year for The Cricketer , as well as supplying news items and obituaries. His pride and joy was probably his work for the Wisden Almanack updating annually both the Record Section and Births & Deaths. Also on a yearly basis he provided ‘Feats, Facts and Figures’, a feature running to about 20 pages for the Athletic News Cricket Annual . In 1931 owing to deteriorating eyesight and general poor health, Ashley- Cooper was forced to abandon work and sell his incredible cricket library. Ashley-Cooper died at his home in January 1932. He remains a unique figure in the world of cricket research, history and statistics, fortunate in his early friendship with C.W.Alcock and then his worldwide circle of cricketing correspondents. Only a few months prior to Ashley-Cooper’s death, one of the most unusual cricket historians had passed away. Percy Francis Thomas died in Cricklewood, Middlesex on October 13, 1931. He was born in Woolwich in 1866 and the 1901 census shows him as running a confectioners shop in Hackney. Whilst Ashley-Cooper gives the impression of a very serious minded individual, though one who would willingly help other statisticians, Thomas, who usually wrote under the alias ‘Hippo-Pott-Thomas’, or its acronym, ‘H.P.T., was described as a man of humour, that however, hid a very enquiring mind and a broader knowledge of life than Ashley-Cooper possessed. An early flavour of Thomas’s thinking and disposition is shown in a letter to The Cricket Field in December 1893. I quote a short opening section: ‘Sir – The latest development of the classification question prompts me to trouble you with some comments which I hope, as one of the barbarian instigators of the upset, you will permit me to make, in however small type (Thomas had proposed a scheme for the classification of the 105