Cricket's Historians

Differences in Style Cricket volume was written by Sir John Collings Squire, author and poet. His principal contribution to cricket writing was the reviewing of books on the game, but he was also a cricketer, though of the J.M.Barrie variety, keen rather than talented, and ran his own side ‘The Invalids’. He died in Heathfield, Sussex in December 1958 aged 74. Second only toNeville Cardus as a descriptive writer was R.C.Robertson- Glasgow, whose articles began to appear in The Cricketer in 1924. Born in Edinburgh in 1901, Raymond Charles Robertson-Glasgow was educated at Charterhouse and Oxford, where he was awarded his blue in 1920. He played for Somerset – he amusingly noted that he qualified for the county by changing trains at Taunton – on and off from 1920 to 1935, being a fast-medium bowler. In 1933 he was appointed cricket correspondent to the Morning Post and later wrote for the Daily Telegraph , The Observer and The Sunday Times . A charming person with a great sense of humour, which was reflected in his prose, sadly he developed into a manic-depressive and died by his own hand in 1965. Whilst a study of his writings reveals a fairly profound knowledge of cricket’s history, his essay ‘The Origins of Cricket’ gives some idea of his lack of reverence for historians, who take their subject too seriously. The essay appropriately appeared shortly after the first publication of Altham’s History . The former begins: ‘It has long been a problem of acute interest to the thinking man, whether cricket (Pila Complex) was the grandmother, sister, or granddaughter of Fives (Pila Palmaris);’ His two collections of essays, Cricket Prints and More Cricket Prints , are outstanding, but encompass only players that Robertson-Glasgow met and knew. I must add that the illustration on the cover of the second volume is of the Notts batsman, Joe Hardstaff, – he is not the subject of one of the essays! I left the Wisden Almanack in the last chapter in the early 1930s apparently flourishing and unchanged in its format over the past half century. However time was catching up the Cricketer’s Bible as it was now termed. Sales started to drop and after the 1937 edition, the Wisden 115