Cricket's Historians

156 More County Histories and The Cricket Society grows despite the fact that the work is nothing like as substantial as Snow’s Leicestershire volume. The book, discounting the statistical section, is divided into three parts of more or less equal length, yet the three periods covered are of vastly differing time scales. H.S.Altham’s section 1756 to 1914 has 66 pages; Arlott’s 21 seasons between the wars is given 59 pages and Desmond Eagar’s 11 seasons (1946 to 1956) has 56 pages. In effect Altham waltzes through his piece more or less repeating the detail which appeared in his general history. Arlott provides very pleasant essays on six of his childhood favourites and then seasonal summaries. Eagar, as both captain and secretary of the County Club during the post-war period, provides the best section of the work though it was necessarily rather subjective. Roy Webber supplies 37 pages of records, but does not attempt to tackle the difficult problem of the status of Hampshire matches prior to 1895. Edward Desmond Russell Eagar was born in 1917 and educated at Cheltenham. He played a few games for his native Gloucestershire and gained a cricket blue at Oxford in 1939. He joined Hampshire as captain- secretary in 1946, retired as player in 1957, but remained as County Secretary until his death in 1977. A keen cricket historian and bibliophile he edited the Hampshire C.C.C. Yearbook and wrote occasional cricket articles for the press, mostly on topics related to the County. It was a pity he had no time to research and write about early cricket history, since he had the knowledge and the ability to do so. The catalogue for the sale, in 2005, of his cricket library provides an insight into the study Eagar made of early cricket literature. His son, Patrick, became the best-known cricket photographer of his time (perhaps all time). The mention of Roy Webber in connection with the Hampshire history provides the opportunity to review the very mixed bag of work that he had published following his ground-breaking Playfair Record Book . Webber compiled The Playfair Book of Test Cricket in two volumes, the first, covering matches up to 1939, was issued in 1952 and the second, bringing the record up to date in 1953. Like his Record Book it was a fresh concept (though it clearly owed something to Roberts’ 1947 book) and