Cricket's Historians

134 Roy Webber and the Society of Cricket Statisticians ‘Secretary, Cricket Book Society’, though to all intents and purposes the Society was defunct. In retrospect the two best remembered features of the annual were the Who’s Who of all current players and, separately, their career records. These features did not in fact appear until the 1950 edition. The Who’s Who section commences ominously with the note ‘To the best of our belief this Who’s Who of English Cricketers is the most accurate and most complete record of its kind ever published.’ It is an interesting exercise to compare the Playfair Who’s Who with that information in the 1950 News Chronicle Annual . The News Chronicle does not list University players, but tends to be more descriptive than Playfair . There’s no clue as to the source of the News Chronicle data. In 1952 Roy Webber is credited as a contributor, though not until 1956 is he mentioned as Crawford White’s assistant. Another annual that covered the national English cricket scene in the early post-war period was The Daily Worker Cricket Annual , which almost copied the News Chronicle and was edited by A.A.Thomas. It lasted just three years 1948-1950. Thomas was also the author of Test Form at a Glance . Published in 1953 it ran in 188 pages and gave the statistics of every Test player rubber by rubber, together with the domestic team which each player represented and his dates of birth and, where relevant, death. An interesting section in the book gives wicketkeeping averages – a percentage of total victims against total wickets in fall. The major batsmen are listed with the bowlers to dismiss them most times and another section records most ducks and pairs. The volume was re-issued as a paperback, so sales must have been reasonable. Findon’s Cricket Annual , edited by Matty Watson was not so statistical as those others mentioned. No detailed county averages are printed; it gave recent Test Match scores and brief notes on each county, but also included sundry essays by well-known cricketing people. The annual lasted four years, 1947-1950. Mention should be made of the pre-tour guides which accompanied the arrival of Test touring teams to England and in particular those edited by A.W.Simpson. The first came out for the Indian tourists in 1932 and the