Cricket's Historians

The Cricketer Magazine merely reinforces his hypothesis. Another avenue explored in the booklets is the origin of the Laws of Cricket. He takes apart the earliest known published set of Laws and produces a convincing possible earlier version. There is no space here to explore the other themes aired – a study of his booklets is obligatory for serious students. On another plane, Thomas issued from 1924 to 1931 a very bizarre cricket annual, latterly titled The Cricket Spectator, An Annual Miscellany for the Lover of the Game . Whilst Ashley-Cooper was producing one publication after another and Thomas pursuing his strange if interesting ends, the other pre-war cricket stalwart, J.N.Pentelow was chiefly engaged in schoolboy fiction working for the Amalgamated Press and their weekly publications, The Magnet and The Gem . He was for a time editor of these famous comics and as such in charge of Charles Hamilton (alias ‘Frank Richards’) author of the Greyfriars/Billy Bunter sagas. In fact he is believed to have written some episodes when Hamilton’s copy failed to appear. Pentelow did not totally neglect his cricketing past. In 1921 he wrote two cricket supplements for The Magnet . The first was a brief ‘History of Australian Tours to England’ – Australia toured in 1921. The second was much more substantial – ‘Who’s Who in the Cricket World’. This ran to 88 pages and was the most comprehensive work of its kind to date, far exceeding the small potted players’ biographies which were published in the cricket annuals of the time. Pentelow also wrote occasional articles for The Cricketer , but the principal conduit for his cricket writing was Ayres’ Cricket Companion . As has been noted, W.R.Wright was the Editor of this publication, but Pentelow took over when Wright died 1927. Pentelow died on 5, July 1931 aged only 59, so it is a sad coincidence that perhaps the four most worthwhile cricket historians/statisticians of the first quarter of the 20 th century (Waghorn, Ashley-Cooper, Thomas and Pentelow) died within eighteen months of each other. There was a void to be filled, but before looking for successors, an update on the career of that other pre-war statistician, Sir Home Gordon, would seem appropriate. The revised editions of his Cricket Form At A Glance were 107