Cricket's Historians

106 The Cricketer Magazine counties in the columns of The Sportsman newspaper). What Mr Ellison intends by his extraordinary motion I cannot conceive. If he wishes to cancel the miscalled ‘Championship’ and ‘invidious distinction’ of class altogether, the only certain way of doing so seems to be to abandon the competition and county cricket altogether…’ The actual letter is some 1,000 words in length. Some five years later, Thomas contributes a cartoon to the magazine Cricket depicting a tree with men climbing up it, each man representing a county. In view of the present (2010) complex method of awarding points in the Championship, his attached note bears reproduction: ‘This – a figurative design without a numeral figure upon it – is the latest thing in glance guides. Cricketers who have been satiated with points and decimals, systems and proportions, ought to welcome a result table that makes no call upon their mathematical faculties for its comprehension. What could be plainer? From Lancashire at the top of the tree, honourably snatching at the laurels of victory; to Derbyshire at the bottom, making equally sure of the wooden spoon, every county is portrayed in the true position to which the M.C.C. warrants it to have climbed.’ Thomas’s contributions to Cricket became more frequent and his poems more verbose during the magazine’s final years. Those are however a sideshow. His greatest piece of published research and logical thought came in a series of booklets in the 1920s. The six booklets go under the general title of Old English Cricket and were issued by C.H.Richards of Nottingham between 1922 and 1929 – there is an excellent index, which is combined to cover all six booklets. Despite the paucity of known contemporary references, Thomas sets out to prove that theWeald between the North and South Downs in south-east England was the birthplace of cricket. The mass of additional data discovered since Thomas’s time