Cricket's Historians

More County Histories and The Cricket Society grows literature. Scales also possessed a splendid collection of county yearbooks, including most of those issued by Minor Counties. He delighted in composing lists of players with given characteristics, such as bespectacled cricketers, bearded cricketers, left-handers and many other more esoteric categories. He compiled an exhaustive list of 18 th century players, which was published in instalments by The Cricket Society. His final articles for The Cricketer were printed in 1962 after which he suffered increasingly from ill-health. He died at his home in West Byfleet, Surrey in January 1974 aged 67. Another early stalwart of the Society was Leslie Charles Fielding, whose major published work ‘Batting, Bowling and Fielding Figures Between the Wars’ printed in 11 parts in The Cricketer through 1945 has already been mentioned. A P.E. teacher from Manor Park in Essex, he contributed regularly to the early Society publications, chiefly with season-by-season figures of notable cricketers. He died in Manor Park in February 1981, aged 78. A more original statistician than Fielding was his near neighbour, A.H.Wagg. A maths teacher in London he scoured the British Museum Newspaper Library in Colindale for match scores of overseas games and built up an unrivalled collection, becoming the authority on the subject, especially in relation to matches in the Indian sub-continent and the West Indies. It was through his researches that the detailed scores of the 1930- 31 Vizianagram Indian tour matches were eventually published. He wrote many letters to The Cricketer between 1937 and 1953 and later contributed articles to Playfair Cricket Monthly , as well as the Society Newsletter. He resigned from The Cricket Society when he felt the Society had drifted away from its core aims. Alfred H.Wagg died in Wanstead in April 1980, having been born in February 1903. Returning to the subject of county histories, in the same year as Coldham’s book was published, Sussex: A History was issued. Although the author was a well-known journalist, in contrast to too many histories by that tribe, where the seasons fondly remembered by the author swallow a large portion of the work, half the Sussex history is devoted to pre-1914 165