Cricket's Historians

Chapter 10 Mainly County Histories and Overseas Annuals If Webber’s Record Book meant a new beginning for cricket statisticians, the same could not be said for the sumptuous new history of the game, The History of Cricket by Eric Parker, published by Seeley Service & Co, as part of the Lonsdale Library of Sports, Games & Pastimes, in 1950. It was the 30 th volume in the series and Eric Parker was, with the Earl of Lonsdale, the joint editor of the whole series. In that capacity he had acted as Editor of The Game of Cricket , which had been issued twenty years before. This latter volume was a purely instructional work, in which the famous cricketers of the day explain how to bat, bowl, keep wicket and so on. It was a large work and competed with numerous other books of the sort; Parker’s History had effectively only Altham-Swanton’s History for competition; this had just appeared in its fourth edition. Eric Parker was born in East Barnet, Hertfordshire, in 1870, educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford. A prolific author, he started as a journalist on the St James’ Gazette , but from 1911 worked for The Field , being editor-in-chief from 1930. For most of his adult life he lived in Hambledon – as he pointed out, not in Hampshire but in Surrey. His first book with any substantial cricketing content was Highways and Byways in Surrey published in 1908. Parker’s History lacks balance and appears to be a series of 41 chapters, each written in a vacuum. One hesitates to suggest the date at which Parker began writing the book, but it would seem that there were long intervals between each chapter and the inclusion of the chapter entitled 139