Cricket's Historians

112 Chapter 8 Differences in Style In the 1920s, Ashley-Cooper and P.F.Thomas were the principal historians who published the results of their cricket researches, but in both cases much that they issued was as a result of their discoveries made in the previous two decades. They leant heavily on the cricketing notes that Waghorn had published, also in pre-war days. Historians such as C.I.S.Wallace and A.H.J.Cochrane had a great interest in how cricket evolved and wrote occasional articles on the subject, however the one man who continued the pre-war work of Waghorn and Ashley-Cooper in depth and had his researches published in book form was G.B.Buckley. His first volume was published by Cotterell & Co of Birmingham in 1935, entitled Fresh Light on 18 th Century Cricket . Buckley (or his brother, Francis, whom he thanks in the Preface for ‘having discovered and collected many of these Cricket notices’) spent much time combing the newspaper collections of the British Museum, the Bodleian and 35 other provincial libraries listed in his two volumes. The most important difference between the work of the Buckleys and that of Waghorn is that the former records the name of the newspaper from which the extract comes and the date. In some examples the Buckleys quote the reference in Waghorn and then add to it, but the notes are not necessarily the full newspaper detail. A second volume, Fresh Light on Pre-Victorian Cricket was issued by the same publishers in 1937 and this time although the main research took place at the British Museum, quite a number of provincial libraries were also used. This second volume