Cricket's Historians

122 Differences in Style sides and was a talented club batsman, good enough to play three games for Middlesex. Swanton later became a major figure in cricket journalism and literature after serving in the Second World War. A more talented writer than Swanton was Bernard Darwin, grandson of Charles. Born in Downe, Kent in 1876, he was on the staff of The Times from 1907 to 1953, writing principally on golf. His best known cricket book is W.G.Grace , a 141 page work published in the ‘Great Lives Series’ issued by Duckworth in 1934. The book was reissued in 1948 and again in 1978. At the behest of Sir Home Gordon, Darwin also wrote 18,000 words for the book Eton v Harrow at Lord’s . The work was compiled by Sir Home Gordon and published by his own company in 1926. Since Ashley- Cooper’s book covering the same ground had only appeared in 1922, this fresh volume added very little. Irving Rosenwater described Darwin’s essay as ‘a mixture of scholarship and fancy which, if not entirely successful or memorable, was naturally couched in the most felicitous prose.’ Darwin died in 1961. Another author who occasionally ventured into cricket was the poet, Thomas Moult. He had been born in Derbyshire in 1885 and had ghost- written Jack Hobbs’ book, Playing for England , a very popular biography which appeared in 1931. In 1935 Moult edited Bat and Ball , which was an anthology with essays by many well-known writers. Moult contributed his own piece running to some 20 pages, this was entitled ‘The Story of The Game’, but is no more than a pleasant summary of cricket’s history. Moult died in Essex in November 1974. Cricket annuals, both national and county, ceased with the outbreak of war in 1939, but one major English title continued throughout the period of hostilities namely the Wisden Almanack . The 1940 edition was very much in line with its immediate predecessors, since it reported the season of 1939, but the editions between 1941 and 1946 were reduced in size, in line with those that were published during the First World War. In the 1941 edition one innovation was the introduction of ‘Some Dates in the History of Cricket’, compiled by H.S.Altham. The