Cricket's Historians

The Pioneers of Cricket’s History and Statistics was described as the ‘projector’ of The Sporting Magazine . He died in 1820 aged 75. So far as cricket is concerned, The Sporting Magazine gave relatively superficial coverage to the game, as indeed did Pierce Egan, whose chief interest was in boxing. He did write a part-work Book of Sports and Mirror of Life which ran to 25 issues and in 1832 was reprinted as a book. One part was devoted to cricket, chiefly concerned with the Hambledon era. More important (from the cricketing viewpoint) was the foundation in 1822 of Bell’s Life in London a weekly publication concentrating on sport and in particular cricket. In the early part of the 19 th century major cricket was very much centred on Lord’s and the M.C.C., but in the 1820s Sussex and Kent revived the 18 th century fashion for inter-county matches. Surrey lacked a patron to promote that county and Hampshire, though having several patrons, failed to find a 19 th century equivalent of the Hambledon Club. The battle to be ‘champion county’ in the South East was thus confined to Kent and Sussex. In the Midlands Nottingham, having shown themselves superior to their neighbours, Sheffield and Leicester, renamed themselves Nottinghamshire and rose by the 1830s to challenge Sussex and Kent. In Norfolk, Suffolk and Yorkshire the idea of having a county side rather than just inter-town or village contests was starting to take root. The press responded by giving more space to matches and the man who tried to supply the cricket data to the newspapers was William Denison. His brief biography simply comments that he ‘was a contributor to most of the morning journals’. Included among these journals were both The Times and Bell’s Life . Born in Lambeth in 1801, Denison was a workaholic. Was Denison the writer of the sections on cricket’s origins in both Tyas and Clark’s handbooks? At the time of writing, no evidence has been found to substantiate this possibility. He himself announced in the 1840s, ‘I never spent more than four hours in bed on any single night.’ Cricket in that decade would not have occupied a journalist full time twelve months a year, so Denison also covered events in the House of Commons and, probably as a result, is rumoured to have made friends with a fellow 18