Cricket's Historians

162 More County Histories and The Cricket Society grows Brierley, a Preston journalist, who had reported on cricket for various Lancashire papers since 1895. He had previously written the Jubilee History of the Football League. In September 1951 Brierley died aged 79 in St Annes-on-Sea. Ledbroke took over the rough manuscript from Brierley’s widow and with the help of the extensive notebooks that Brierley had kept, he developed the final work. The book comprised 500 word descriptions of each season, with separate chapters on the various notable personalities, both players and officials. Unlike Snow’s Leicestershire history there is virtually no detail prior to the formation of the County Club in 1864, only a note on the matches v Yorkshire before that date and nothing on the historic Manchester v Liverpool contests. Northamptonshire Cricket , published in 1959, is a much better researched book than either Roberts’ or Ledbroke’s. The author, James ‘Jim’ Desmond Bowden Coldham, has been mentioned briefly before. Born in January 1924 and educated at King’s School, Harrow, he was conscripted in 1942 and served in India and Burma as part of the 14 th Army. In 1947 he joined the Crown Agents Office of the Civil Service and remained there until forced to retire early due to ill-health in 1979. During the war he was a frequent letter-writer to The Cricketer on many subjects – Dickens being one, lob bowling another and of course Northants. Although he was a founder member of the Society of Cricket Statisticians, his interest lay in the history of cricket rather than its statistics. In time he built up a rather specialised library of cricket material tending to bypass the heavyweight volumes in favour of the shorter booklets written by Ashley-Cooper and others of that ilk. Although he is now best-known for his history of Northamptonshire, which is a very soundly based work, perhaps not quite in Snow’s class, but worthy of great merit, his short essays which appeared in The Cricketer and The Journal of The Cricket Society must really be his monument. He was editor of that Journal from March 1970 to April 1984 and his overall knowledge of cricket’s history made him the ideal man for the