Cricket's Historians

Rowland Bowen causes Ripples first was edited by Crawford White and the second by Gordon Ross, as has been mentioned, but the News Chronicle collapsed in 1961. Webber then decided to run the paper’s cricket annual on his own – it appeared in 1962 purely as The Cricket Annual – the proverbial straw and camel’s back come immediately to mind. His ability to set cricket statistics out in a manner that was easily comprehensible to the ordinary reader was quite admirable, his major flaw as has been commented upon, was his terrible lack of historical understanding. Two men took over Webber’s great statistical mountain. Arthur Wrigley, who had been Webber’s scoring colleague with the B.B.C., was handed the task of updating Webber’s books on Test Matches. Wrigley, born in Heaton Moor, Lancashire, in 1912 and educated at Heaton Moor College, was, like Webber, an accountant by profession. He began scoring for the B.B.C. in 1934 and, after war service as a bomber navigator with the RAF, he resumed his B.B.C. work. Unlike the two volume work on Tests which Webber had compiled, Wrigley fitted all the Tests into a single volume. This was published by Epworth Press in 1965. Wrigley changed the Webber format, in that he arranged the Tests as a set of series, rather than simply running them from 1877 in straight chronological order. There is an extensive record section of 176 pages. It was to prove Wrigley’s only cricket book – he died in Stockport on October 30, 1965 aged 53. Webber’s mantle in so far as the Playfair publications were concerned, was taken over by Michael Fordham. A local government officer from Maidstone, though born in Faversham, Fordham had only just taken on the role of principal statistician to The Cricket Society from W.S.Condor, when Webber died; Fordham resigned his new post in October 1963 in order to allow time for his work with Playfair. A modest man, he did not possess Webber’s ebullience and preferred to keep in the background. Gordon Ross and Roy Webber had been joint editors of most of the current Playfair cricket titles: in future Gordon Ross took sole charge, just crediting the statistical work to Fordham. In historical matters, Fordham proceeded with extreme caution. His only cricket title was to be a brief book on the Gillette Cup – this appeared in 1976. He married Daphne, 179