Cricket's Historians

Roy Webber and the Society of Cricket Statisticians The third booklet introduced to the cricket book reading public a fresh face, Gerald Brodribb, though subscribers to The Cricketer would have noticed his name in the letters column from 1929 and under some articles from 1939. It was quite apparent that Brodribb was a cut above the usual compiler of cricket statistics. Arthur Gerald Norcott Brodribb was born in St Leonard’s on Sea, Sussex in 1915. He was educated at Eastbourne and University College, Oxford and although he did not obtain a place in either the school or university teams, he was a very useful club cricketer, playing for M.C.C. and the Jesters. He joined the teaching profession and was at Repton, Christ’s Hospital and Canford before becoming headmaster of a Sussex Prep School. A keen archaeologist, Brodribb was a member of the Society of Antiquaries. His first book for Webber’s Society was Some Memorable Innings . Brodribb’s Foreword has the note thanking county secretaries for permission to inspect county scorebooks. That point alone sets the author on a level not reached by the vast majority of cricket statisticians in 1946. He also includes a number of non-first-class innings, such as the one by D.K.Yarde for Central India v M.C.C. Yarde batted five hours 20 minutes for an innings of 24. In 1951 Brodribb’s All Round The Wicket was published by Sporting Handbooks. This is a collection of 36 essays by the author, some of which had previously been issued in The Cricketer or The Field . The essays cover a wide variety of subjects from Charles Dickens to an analysis of how often batsmen are dismissed by each of the modes of getting out. Brodribb followed this book with Next Man In , a survey of cricket laws and customs; the feast of incidents portrayed in the book demonstrate the depth of the author’s researches into cricket literature. The book was later revised and re-issued as was another Brodribb title Hit For Six . This, as its name implies, is a book on the hitting of sixes and the author visited many cricket grounds in England in order to check the facts he had obtained from match reports. Brodribb later wrote biographies of Gilbert Jessop and Nicholas Felix. Stephen Green, the Lord’s archivist, commented 129