Cricket's Historians

Rowland Bowen causes Ripples Journal was to be issued twice a year and the first issue appeared in April 1961, with the Committee turning to a man nearly twenty years younger than Bowen – a man who at first glance seemed to be a reincarnation of Ashley-Cooper. This young man had from boyhood hidden himself away in the darkest corners of Somerset House, the British Museum, Colindale and other repositories of ancient documents and moved on to devour the library at Lord’s, all the time building up his own cricket library. Irving Rosenwater, initially registered as ‘Isidore’, was born in Mile End, East London in September 1932. His parents worked in the ‘rag’ trade and he was educated at Parmenter’s Grammar School before becoming an articled clerk in a legal firm. Like Bowen his prowess on the cricket field was minimal. His first letter published in The Cricketer and dated June 1949, commences: “Allow me to correct an error which appears in the current issue of your fine paper…” Rosenwater is writing from his parents’ home in Diggon St, Stepney. A year later his second letter to The Cricketer begins: “May I be permitted to point out one or two omissions which have occurred in the recent publications of Minor Counties Records…” His letter of April 1955 provides a good example of the depth to which his researches had gone: “Mr Roy Webber’s note in the Spring Annual ….requires considerable emendation as it is based on a wholly erroneous assumption…” The subject was Endean’s hundred before lunch for Transvaal. Rosenwater’s first signed article in The Cricketer was published in 1956. Entitled ‘The Hazards of Cricket’, the piece describes many injuries suffered by cricketers, spectators and innocent passers-by, beginning with Mr Legat in 1731. In 1960 he was commissioned to write a regular column ‘Feats, Facts and Figures’ – it was hardly a coincidence that Ashley-Cooper ran a feature with precisely that title in the Athletic News Annual , from 1914 to 1931. In 1962 The Cricketer provided space both 173