Cricket's Historians

Roy Webber and the Society of Cricket Statisticians lived in Formby, Lancashire, retired to a village near Grange-over- Sands and died in 1979. His only separate published cricketing work was an appreciation of V.M.Merchant, issued in 1950 • N.Stanley Curnow supplied the South African details. He was the official cricket statistician of the South African Cricket Union, and the South African correspondent for the Wisden Almanack until 1959. His first letter to The Cricketer had been published in 1933. He compiled a detailed score sheet for all Currie Cup matches. • H.Haggarty supplied Sheffield Shield information. From 1939 to 1957 he had articles, mainly on Sheffield Shield matters, published in The Cricketer . • J.D.Coldham, Webber noted, answered a special questionnaire – Coldham, who later became an esteemed Editor of The Journal of The Cricket Society , will feature in more detail later. • John F.Griffiths checked the proofs. Griffiths was the compiler of the Record Section of the Kent C.C.C. Annual from 1954 to 1985. The problems of Webber and the ranking of major cricket matches have been already noted and Rosenwater makes a meal of the fact that Webber did not investigate the thorny question of the status of ‘borderline’ matches. Webber does explain in a single page his criteria for first-class status, but such a bland remark as: ‘South Africa, New Zealand and West Indies: There is no real difficulty in the assessment of these matches, all matches falling definitely into two categories’, does not inspire much confidence in Webber’s checking the score sheets of matches in those three Test Playing countries. Having spent the last few paragraphs moaning that Webber was not Ashley-Cooper, it is vital to redress the balance and praise the positive side of the book. Nothing approaching it had ever been published before. In effectWebber took the Wisden Record Section layout as a basic format and expanded it, as The Cricketer had stated in its review, ‘no one will henceforth dare to 137