Cricket's Historians

170 Rowland Bowen causes Ripples the programme is still unknown. One man even more incensed than the contestant that Sussex belonged in the list of County Champions was a certain Major Rowland Bowen. In 1952 Webber had begun a regular feature on cricket statistics in The Cricketer . In June 1953 he broaches the subject of the County Championship competition of the 1870s and subsequent articles regarding the history of the Championship in general appear through 1954. At the foot of one article Webber had noted: ‘Several readers have written to me about this series of articles on the early days of the County Championship. Regular readers of The Cricketer will remember the article by ‘‘Senex’’ last year and my reply. This provoked a considerable amount of correspondence, including a lengthy letter from Major R.Bowen….’ In hindsight, perhaps it was a pity that Bowen’s letter was not published. So far as the public was concerned the controversial subject of the 1870s Champions then lay dormant until the fateful TV programme. Norman Preston, the editor of Wisden , was affronted that Webber had the temerity to challenge the long established cricket facts as published in the Almanack . When Rowland Bowen appeared on his white charger to confront and try to flatten the upstart Webber, Preston was delighted to offer space in the 1959 edition of Wisden , so that Bowen could uphold the proud position Wisden held in cricketing circles. At that moment, it must be a matter of conjecture how well acquainted Preston was with Rowland Bowen, when he agreed to print Bowen’s essay on the subject of the 1875 County Champions. Bowen never did things by half. Instead of merely checking out the controversial season of 1875, he cast his net much wider and did thirty years of digging into contemporary accounts of county cricket each season from 1860 to 1889. The resultant essay, running to 5,000 words, explained in detail the views of the various contemporary publications and this duly appeared in the 1959 Wisden . It served Preston’s purpose of demolishing Webber’s 1875 Sussex theory, by the simple method of demonstrating that Webber