Cricket's Historians

More County Histories and The Cricket Society grows the publishers again maintained a high quality in the production. Each scorecard – numbered in chronological order – had a 200 word match description. Fall of wickets, captains, wicketkeepers and umpires are shown as well as which side won the toss. Where a Test series comprised three or more matches, sets of averages for individual series are included. There is a section which contains the standard selection of record tables, also career records and a good index, both to players and the matches themselves. J.D.Coldham provides a bibliography of books which covered Test tours, a very useful appendix that was discarded when the volumes were later reprinted. 1952 also saw the appearance of Webber’s Who’s Who in World Cricket . This was an expanded version of the Who’s Who that appeared in the 1952 Playfair Cricket Annual , plus the principal overseas cricketers and the main cricketing journalists and broadcasters. The last-mentioned was another feature that was never, we believe, repeated. The players’ career records were, rather surprisingly, very abbreviated and also no forenames were given, only initials. The Playfair Annual of the time was very patchy in its printing of forenames, so Webber , with only partial data to work with, omitted this detail. All Roy Webber’s industry over many years had now flowered into books that provided cricket followers with the basic statistics to be able to check new ‘records’ as they occurred. Further research in scorebooks and newspapers has unearthed pieces of information which to a limited extent adjusts the figures Webber laid down, but he built the foundations on which later statisticians could expand. With the increasing interest in statistical and other cricketing tables it is perhaps strange that some of the compilations included in Webber’s early books have been omitted by later compilers and disappeared, although one could make the same remarks about some of Ashley-Cooper’s work. With this wealth of work behind him – he was, as has been mentioned, scoring for the B.B.C. and producing statistical data for the News Chronicle as well – Webber unfortunately launched himself from the statistical to the historical. In 1957 came The County Cricket Championship : A History of 157