Cricket's Historians

128 Roy Webber and the Society of Cricket Statisticians of a ‘Cricket Book Society’, which would issue a series of booklets, each being between 32 and 64 pages in length. These publications would appear at roughly monthly intervals and cost about two shillings each. Webber stated that he already had six manuscripts in the pipeline. Two months later he officially formed the Society and announced that it required a membership of 500 to be viable. The major difference between Weigall’s organisation and Webber’s was that the former was purely amateur, with authors and officials being unpaid, whereas Webber was hoping to earn an income from his Society. Webber’s Society issued its first booklet in August 1946. A Concise History of Cricket was written by S.H.Butler. It was depressingly inaccurate, though only 40 pages in length. The booklet begins by stating that the first reference to the game of cricket occurred in the 15 th century and the first overseas reference was in 1670 (in fact, 1676) in Antioch. William Clarke’s All England Eleven was said to have toured the country for ‘several’ seasons, whereas in fact the team lasted over 30 years. Research by Irving Rosenwater revealed many years later that S.H.Butler was just a pen name for Roy Webber and as Webber’s subsequent efforts would make quite plain, his knowledge of cricket history was deficient. Roy Webber was born in Brighton in 1914; he trained as an accountant and served in the R.A.F. during the Second World War; he died in November 1962. Unlike Weigall, Canynge Caple and a number of the founding members of the Statisticians Society, there is no record of Webber contributing articles or letters to The Cricketer prior to 1945. This Concise History was his first venture into print and it seems obvious that he launched it without allowing for any known historians to check its veracity. In 1947 Webber took the post as scorer for the B.B.C. and his career as a major cricket statistician grew from that base, rather than from his Cricket Book Society. In 1946 however Webber pressed on with his Society. The second booklet to appear was the first part of a revised version of Canynge Caple’s Cricketers’ Who’s Who . There were to be four more parts which only took the cricketers to Trevor Every, after which the Society folded.