Cricket's Historians

194 The World of Cricket the Second XI match details were reduced to potted scores and the reports disappeared from the First XI scores. There were one or two articles by national figures. Mike Carey ghosted Dennis Amiss’s autobiography In Search of Runs and in 1997 he wrote the biography of the Derbyshire and England cricketer, Les Jackson, but Carey retired from cricket journalism in the 1980s. Somerset The yearbook covering the season 1960 is given as ‘Year Book 1960-61’. It is 92 pages in length, but no price is shown. Ominously the Foreword begins: ‘The absence of photographs, other than the usual team photograph, in this year’s publication is due entirely to the lack of suitable material’. However the First XI scorecards are accompanied by good match reports and although the Second XI scores are only potted, there are brief reports of each match. There is no Record Section. One assumes the County Club Secretary is the editor – Ron Roberts provides a short essay on the 1961 Australians. Later in the 1960s appeared Cricket in Somerset which was a combination of county and local club data and The Somerset Dragon which annual appeared in 1969. The County Club issued an Annual Report, but what might described as a ‘proper’ annual did not reappear until 1979, when Michael Hill started to develop what is still the county annual. Surrey The 1961 yearbook continued the long line of Surrey annuals which began in 1884. There are full scorecards for all matches involving the County Club including Club & Ground, Colts and Young Cricketers of Surrey. Unlike the Yorkshire annual there was no tradition of listing every Surrey cricketer, either with dates of birth and death or just career records. In the 1960 edition, Roy Webber had introduced some very basic Surrey batting records, culled straight from his Record Book; in 1961 four pages or so were given to bowling and fielding records. The cost of the annual was 2s 6d and it contained 176 pages. In 1970 the number of