Cricket's Historians

176 Rowland Bowen causes Ripples Bowen wrote his own essay on Ashley-Cooper and printed it in his own magazine. Bowen was out to prove that not only did Ashley-Cooper make mistakes, but that he showed a distinct reluctance to acknowledge and correct any errors he made. Whilst these two historical leviathans were jousting with one another, lesser mortals were plotting to create another English cricket magazine. It will be recalled that the Playfair Cricket Annual had been originally the work of Peter West and Roy Webber. In 1954, Peter West left the annual for his blossoming broadcasting career and the editorship was taken over by Gordon Ross. Gordon John Ross, born in 1918, had served in the R.A.F. during the Second World War and after being demobilized had sought a place in sports publishing. In 1949 he was appointed editor of the Playfair Rugby Annual , which also entailed the editing and production of Rugby Union match programmes as well as the match programmes for Arsenal F.C. At the same time he wrote articles for the press on both codes of football and on cricket. Ross in 1954 also took over from Peter West as editor of the pre-tour brochures for Test Teams to England (Pakistan 1954 being Ross’s first). As with the Playfair annuals, Webber provided the statistics. Ross was the stereotypical marketing man – he was later to become the cricketing person for Gillette and very good in the role – but in 1957 he decided to launch himself as a cricket historian with a hardback book The Surrey Story , cashing in on Surrey’s brilliant run of County Championship honours. The book is very lightweight and merely an updated version of Palgrave’s work In May 1960 in harness with Roy Webber, Ross launched Playfair Cricket Monthly . It was the first serious rival to The Cricketer since the demise of The Cricketers’ Magazine in 1953. As one might expect from the Playfair stable, the new periodical was far slicker than The Cricketer . The page layout was more attractive, the paper quality better, the larger picture content was better reproduced. The page size was larger. The new magazine was monthly throughout the year, whereas The Cricketer , which had been weekly before the war was now fortnightly through the season