Cricket's Historians

Differences in Style contains three Appendices which bring together other information found during the researches. The titles of matches are discussed and the possible qualifications for players to appear in certain teams. Also explored are the Articles of Agreement which ran in conjunction with the basic Laws. G.B.Buckley contributed articles to The Cricketer from 1937 to 1962 and some of his additional notices were later printed in The Cricket Quarterly . These were part of two volumes of manuscripts that were left to M.C.C. George Bent Buckley was born in Yorkshire in 1885. He trained as a surgeon in Manchester and after serving in the R.A.M.C. during the First World War, he moved to Weston-super-Mare, where he set up a private practice. He retired in 1938 and died, after a long illness, in April 1962. Buckley’s work was for a very small select band of readers. Most of the cricketing reading public of the 1930s were more enamoured by two more romantic writers. Some readers of this present work may protest that neither of these authors really belongs in a volume of this sort, but excluding themwould present a false picture of the time when nostalgia was the order of the day and both writers at least flirted with cricket’s history, even if they could not be described as either historians or statisticians. In 1922, a volume A Cricketer’s Book was published by Grant Richards. The book contained a collection of essays, combined with the reports of the 1921 Test series between England and Australia. One of the essays concerns the change in bowling styles from Hambledon to the 1920s, but the remainder are, for the most part, describing current or recently retired cricketers. The essays were first published in the Manchester Guardian and the author was Neville Cardus, the Guardian cricket correspondent. He was building a reputation as a journalist who described the playing of cricket in a new style, giving the reader his impressions of play and even imagined conversations between players. Cardus became the English equivalent of the French Impressionists, but in words rather than paint. After this initial book, Cardus often wrote essays on cricketers and matches that he had never himself witnessed – historical sketches. In 1930 he was commissioned by Longmans Green & Co to write Cricket for their English Heritage series. It contains a chapter entitled ‘Laws and 113