Cricket's Historians

184 The World of Cricket running The Cricketer magazine are heavily involved in the work; John Arlott, who reviews books for Wisden , is a contributor; Gordon Ross acts as reviewer for the Playfair Cricket Monthly ; also contributing were most, if not all the broadsheet cricket journalists. As a disinterested party, Rowland Bowen had the reviewing field to himself. Given that he had condemned the book, unseen, two or three years prior to publication, it is scarcely surprising that his comments are caustic. It is rather curious though that the book’s section on the County Championship follows the Webber path – although no author is given for this section. What is equally blatant is that the foundation dates for the various counties, researched so diligently by Bowen and published mainly in The Cricketer , have been ignored completely. Whether these two rather odd aberrations can be placed at Rosenwater’s door, designed just to annoy Bowen, seems to stretch the enmity a little too far. A brief biographical note on Swanton has been given in Chapter 8. By 1966 he was perhaps the most authoritative voice in English cricket, but, for his knowledge of cricket prior to the First World War, he had to lean heavily on Rosenwater. Second in command of the book was Michael Melford. Melford, born in London in November 1916, was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford, where he achieved sporting prowess as an athlete. He served in the Royal Artillery in the Second World War, then joined the Daily Telegraph as a sports journalist; in 1961 he was appointed senior cricket and rugby correspondent of the newly founded Sunday Telegraph . He had had a column in The Cricketer magazine in 1954 and continued to submit articles on mainly topical matters for the magazine. He was a popular journalist of sound judgment who wrote well, but his only major cricket books were Peter May’s ghosted autobiography and a book on post-1945 cricket. His ability to ferret out historical errors in the work of the other contributors was minimal. He was later editor of the Daily Telegraph Cricket Year Book , which ran for nine years from 1982, giving a pleasant, but relatively superficial overview of the preceding English season, with statistics provided at different times by Bill Frindall and Wendy Wimbush.