Cricket's Historians

Mainly County Histories and Overseas Annuals was issued by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1951. Lester himself was a notable cricketer, captaining the Philadelphian teams to England in 1903 and 1908. He gathered several other well-known cricketers to contribute to his book, including J.Barton King and Percy H.Clark. The book relates the story of cricket in the city of Philadelphia and runs to 397 pages, not including a section of informative illustrations, which for some odd reason are bound into the volume at the end after the index. Lester died in 1969. A book on Philadelphian cricket published in 1951 might seem rather obscure, but Philip Snow’s subject was even more far-flung, the book’s title being Cricket in the Fiji Islands published in New Zealand in 1949. Snow tells the detailed history of cricket in Fiji from its first recorded game in 1874. The book closes with the match scores and reports of the Fijian tour to New Zealand in 1948, when the team was captained by the author. Snow, a younger brother of Eric Snow the Leicestershire historian, was born in Leicester in 1915 and educated at Cambridge. He captained Leicestershire 2 nd XI and was very disappointed not to have been given a decent trial whilst at University, being ignored because he went to a Grammar School. Leaving Cambridge in 1938 he immediately joined the Colonial Service and went to Fiji. After 14 years, he left to become the Bursar at Rugby School. Among Snow’s other books are a biography of his brother Lord Snow, and two volumes of autobiography. From 1965 for 30 years he acted as Fiji’s representative to the I.C.C. 153