Cricket's Historians

Mainly County Histories and Overseas Annuals home and resuming his studies. Although over age, he served in the same theatre during the Second World War and captured events of the time on camera. Whether or not the Hon Terence Cornelius Farmer Prittie’s cricketing books really belong in this work is open to question, but the titles invited inclusion, if the actual content does not. His first book Mainly Middlesex was published in 1946 and his second Lancashire Hot-Pot in 1949. The two were later combined as Cricket North and South in 1955. Educated at Stowe and Oxford, Prittie was taken prisoner in June 1940 and his book on Middlesex was written whilst he was a guest of the Germans. In 1946 he was appointed cricket correspondent of the Manchester Guardian , but the appointment only lasted a season. Both his books contain sketches of notable county players, written rather in the style of Robertson-Glasgow. Prittie died in London in 1985. Of much greater importance than Prittie’s cheerfully amusing essays is R.S.Rait Kerr’s The Laws of Cricket published by Longmans, Green & Co in 1950. The book still stands as the major reference work on its subject. In 1944 Rait Kerr wrote a long letter to The Cricketer in response to an article by G.D.Martineau celebrating the 200 th anniversary of the Laws of 1744. It was clear from Rait Kerr’s letter that his knowledge of the history of the Laws was far superior to that of Martineau. In 1945, Rait Kerr was directed by the Committee of the M.C.C. to oversee a complete revision of the current Laws. After consultations with the overseas governing bodies and many other interested parties, the new Laws were agreed by the M.C.C. at their A.G.M. on May 7, 1947 and were to come into force for the 1948 season. The enormous amount of work that Rait Kerr undertook in seeing the project through, allied to his knowledge of the Laws’ history, made him the obvious person to write a detailed thesis on how the Laws developed and when and how new Laws were introduced. His book contains both Goldwin’s poem of 1706 and Perry’s translation of 1922, as well as the Articles of 1727, previously noted in Squire’s book. A reproduction of the 1755 booklet containing the Laws, as well as the various versions of 145