Cricket's Historians

The Cricketer Magazine scores of South Australian matches and averages, but only five pages of historical notes. Sales of the book were very poor and several hundred copies were burnt by O’Reilly’s daughter, when the South Australian Cricket Association declined to buy them for a nominal sum. In Ceylon, cricket followers were fortunate to possess Samuel Peter Foenander, who began adult life as a school teacher, but switched to journalism, becoming Sports Editor of the Ceylon Observer , he was also Ceylon’s correspondent for Wisden . Educated at Wesley School, he had been a very talented wicketkeeper at the turn of the century. Foenander had a splendid cricket library and compiled a number of booklets on Ceylon cricket as well as the Ceylon Cricketers’ Companion which for the three years it lasted (1925-1927) gave a very full account of cricket on the island during those seasons. He died in Colombo in 1967 aged 84. India’s answer to Foenander was the splendidly named Ponchaji Nussarwanji Polishwalla. Based in Bombay he published A Brief History of the Past 50 Years of Indian Cricket in 1914 in Gujarati. He also edited Indian Cricket Annual , which is as diverse as the years in which it was published (between 1917 and 1928, but by no means every year). Polishwalla’s All India Cricket Annual 1934 commemorated his thirty years in cricket journalism, again with odd statistics and unusual snippets of fact. The American equivalent of Polishwalla was Karl Andre Auty. He had an unusual scholastic career, being at the Grammar School in Dewsbury, then at HMS Conway, the Sorbonne in Paris and Nottingham University. He arrived in Chicago where he played cricket and published a cricket annual covering cricket in the state of Illinois, the annual also covered Rugby Football in the state, in some years. Apart the match scores of local games, a wide variety of unexpected articles and some even more unexpected illustrations are included. Auty possessed a large cricket library; he died in Chicago in November 1959 aged 81. Despite being raised to Test status, West Indian islands are barren ground for inter-war cricket literature of an historical nature. 111