Cricket's Historians

120 Differences in Style appears in the correspondence columns of The Cricketer with increasing frequency from 1933 and the following year he published The Cricketers’ Who’s Who . This volume was easily the most comprehensive work of its kind. Issued as a hardback of 214 pages, it contains the biographies of 291 contemporary players, some of which are very detailed. G.T.S.Stevens’ biography is some 1,200 words in length. As well as English county cricketers, Caple gives details of 39 prominent overseas cricketers. His involvement in The Cricket Society as well as his post-war publications will be dealt with later. A book which contained information on cricketers and still remains a very valuable reference work for historians is The Elevens of Three Great Schools 1805-1929 Compiled by W.R.Lyon, it gives the match scores of the games involving Eton, Harrow and Winchester with biographical data on virtually all the players and longer notices on the more important. The work was published by Spottiswoode, Ballantyne & Co.Ltd in 1930. A second work of reference that has remained the staple diet for historians is The Language of Cricket published by the Oxford University Press in 1934. The author was Wilfrid James Lewis and it is the best cricket dictionary yet produced. A number of so-called cricket dictionaries have emerged in post-war years, but it is an enormous pity that the OUP did not employ someone to update Lewis’s book as new words and indeed fresh research have become available. Unlike some of his imitators, he gives the earliest known references to the words included in the work. Lewis was born in Headington in 1868, the son of a college servant. He was employed by the Oxford University Press to work on the Oxford English Dictionary from 1889 to 1933, when he retired. After retirement he continued to assist on a part-time basis and died in Oxford in December 1947. The start of the long road towards clubs or societies for groups of people interested in cricket, but not connected to a club which ran a cricket team as such, seems to have begun with a letter to The Cricketer in August 1929. C.J.Britton of Harborne, Birmingham wrote proposing the formation of a club or society for collectors of Cricketana. The aim would be ‘to preserve by publication or otherwise, records or manuscripts which