Cricket's Historians

126 Roy Webber and the Society of Cricket Statisticians works ended in publication, but beyond those published writers was a large body of people who tinkered with cricket statistics purely for their own amusement or who to a lesser extent browsed through old newspaper files, like Waghorn but not in such a determined and methodical way. The Cricketana Society of the 1930s had been an attempt to reach these amateur enthusiasts, but failed in its endeavour. A letter in the Spring Annual of the 1945 Cricketer magazine was to galvanise the very quiet and generally introverted statisticians, if not completely out of their back bedrooms, at least to the letter box. The letter began: ‘Dear Sir, I have for a number of years now been struck by the fact that no reliable and accurate list is in existence showing the total batting and bowling figures of our leading cricketers, both past and present. ‘I am by no means suggesting however that no such task has been attempted, for this, indeed, is far from being the case. There have in fact been a very large number of totals compiled for many batsmen and bowlers, but unfortunately few of them agree with each other. ‘Of those published, there are the series of tremendous works by Sir Home Gordon entitled “Cricket Form at a Glance”, which covered sixty years, and involved all cricketers who played in any two or more seasons during that period. Figures covering individual or more modest groups of cricketers and for smaller periods of time have been prepared at various times by F.S.Ashley- Cooper, R.O.Edwards, J.N.Pentelow, F.J.C.Gustard and E.L.Roberts, and in addition various cricket works have contained statistics such as Grace’s “Cricket”, Read’s “Annals of Cricket” and of course the invaluable “Wisden’s Almanac”. In all these, however, there are a very large number of errors and inconsistencies, which make it impossible for