Cricket's Historians

188 The World of Cricket writing of cricket biography. They were the first two hardback volumes on historical cricketing figures in which the author did extensive research into the player’s life outside cricket. The few other earlier works, such as Darwin’s life of W.G.Grace, merely regurgitated the facts already printed in other cricketing publications. Rosenwater’s extended essay on Ashley- Cooper was another example of this new trend for in-depth research. Patrick Arthur Macgregor Morrah, born in 1907, was a journalist connected in the main with the Daily Telegraph . His chief historical interest centred on the Restoration and he wrote several books on that period. A wine buff and bon viveur he died in February 1991. In 1967 his book The Golden Age of Cricket was issued. This is a theme ploughed by several other hands and his work added little to the general information known of the era. Moving from the biographical to the statistical, it is worthwhile looking at the development of the county yearbooks in the 1960s on a county-by- county basis: Derbyshire The 1961 Yearbook and that of 1969 are almost identical (the 1970 edition is not used as a sample, since it is a special edition to mark the county club’s centenary). The Births and Deaths section lists all the first- class county players and is very comprehensive – where gaps occur the editor is actively researching players’ biographies to fill those gaps. The Record Section is reasonable. Local clubs and leagues are featured (some counties published a separate yearbook for local club cricket). The First XI matches are headed by good match reports and in 1961 Derbyshire was the only county to provide second innings batting orders. There were 176 pages in 1961 and 172 in 1969 – the price rose from one shilling to two shillings. The joint editors are F.G.Peach and A.F.Dawn. Francis ‘Frank’ George Peach was born in April 1911; he was a founder member of both the Cricket Society and the ACS. Educated at Derby School, he was employed as a chemist with the Spondon company, Celanese. The two editors had founded the Yearbook in 1954 with the same basic format that was still in use in the 1960s and indeed until very recently.