Cricket's Historians

Differences in Style might otherwise be lost’. Britton had an encouraging response and The Cricketana Society was launched on October 21, 1929 in Bride Lane, Fleet St, London. Pelham Warner chaired the meeting; C.J.Britton acted as convenor and G.Neville Weston was appointed Secretary. Britton published two books on cricket, Cricket Books : The 100 Best in 1929 and G.L.Jessop in 1935. Both were modest productions. The Society seems to have made very little impact, though its fortunes were fleetingly boosted by Dr T.R.Hunter in 1933, when he issued a small annual Willow Leaves . This survived for three years. George Neville Weston was born in Kidderminster in March 1901. Educated at King’s School, Worcester and Wolverley Grammar School, he qualified as a solicitor in 1923 and established his own practice in his native town. In the year he became Secretary (and Treasurer) of The Cricketana Society he privately published My Cricket Collection and Cricket Literature . Neville Weston published a number of other booklets limited to a handful of copies, but he turned interestingly to cricketana related to W.G.Grace and a quest to catalogue all the matches in which the great cricketer appeared. In 1973 Weston published a book of 188 pages dealing with Grace’s statistics in minor matches. Weston, who retired to Norfolk in 1970, died in August 1984. In 1938 Allen & Unwin published an updated version of A History of Cricket , the new version being revised by E.W.Swanton. Swanton was born in Forest Hill, South London in 1907 and educated at Cranleigh. From school he went straight into journalism. His first cricket reporting was for the London Evening Standard in 1928, when the chief cricket correspondent was J.A.H.Catton. It was not until 1932 that a piece by Swanton was published in The Cricketer . In February 1938, Swanton was asked by Altham if he would collaborate in a second edition of the History and, according to Swanton, the revised version was for sale 18 weeks later. The book remained faithful to the structure set out by Altham, but to accommodate some of the additions, the bibliographic section of the first edition was scrapped. Swanton had made friends with Altham on the club cricket circuit. Swanton appeared for the Cryptics among other wandering 121