Cricket's Historians

Chapter 1 The Pioneers of Cricket’s History and Statistics This story begins with a scorer, who went one step beyond recording matches in progress, in that he then published the scores of those games. Brief details of the results of cricket matches had started to appear in newspapers in the early years of the 18 th century, in the last third of that century scores showing the totals for individual batsmen and how they were dismissed are published; actual match descriptions usually depend on whether royalty or major figures in the aristocracy either play or attend and riots or disputes are given larger coverage. Poems describing specific games or cricket playing in general are published as small booklets or pamphlets as are the Laws of the Game, but in 1790, Samuel Britcher, the M.C.C. Scorer, compiles the first ‘cricket annual’. This comprises the detailed scores of 14 matches played that season. His annual clearly proves financially worthwhile, since it continues until 1805 (the final issue for 1804/5 probably appearing after Britcher’s death). The annual grows in size and some of the later editions contain over 30 match scores. The Laws of Cricket are also included in some editions as are poems. Several researchers including F.S.Ashley- Cooper, John Batten and John Goulstone have made attempts to identify biographical details of Samuel Britcher, but the most detailed published research on the scorer is by David Rayvern Allen. He published S amuel Britcher. The Hidden Scorer in 1982 and then in 2003 Allen updated his research and Christopher Saunders published not only Allen’s revised effort, but also facsimiles of the 15 editions of the annual. Allen suggests 11