Cricket's Historians

168 More County Histories and The Cricket Society grows he was a Judge dealing mainly in family matters. His first-class brain was allied to a keen sense of humour. In 1964 he was the author of a second book of statistics, Classic Centuries . This details every hundred scored in the England v Australia series of Tests. It is treated very much along the lines of his Bradman work with many similar tables. Wakley, who was a very useful cricketer, opened the batting for Wimbledon C.C. and wrote a history of that club, published in 1954. He was also a founder member of The Society of Cricket Statisticians. He died in September 2001. The second biography, published in 1957, also involved one of cricket’s greatest players and was appropriately titled The Great Cricketer – W.G.Grace. H.S.Altham comments ‘A fresh and sparkling biography of the immortal WG. Never before has the whole story been told with such compelling intimacy and charm’. The book certainly made pleasant reading, but with over a dozen books already featuring WG, the author did not provide any additional data and several further biographies have placed this work in the shadows. The author, Arthur Alexander Thomson, was born in Harrogate in April 1894. Educated at Harrogate Grammar School and King’s College, London, he served in France and Mesopotamia during the First World War. After the war he became a full time writer with a reputation for humorous fiction and travel pieces. His work included novels, verse, stage plays and radio comedies. Among his total of some sixty books are 24, some of which have cricket connexions, others are solely devoted to the game. His first of the latter was Cricket My Pleasure issued in 1953 and comprising a dozen essays. His Yorkshire roots are demonstrated by the fact that the Introduction is by Len Hutton and the Foreword by George Hirst. He wrote a joint biography of Hirst and Rhodes in 1959 and then another on Hutton and Washbrook in 1963. His books proved a popular success and several were re-issued by the Sportsman’s Book Club. In 1963 he was elected President of The Cricket Society and remained in office until his death in June 1968.