Cricket's Historians

200 Bowen Bows Out the inhabitants took cricket seriously. One third of his book comprises a chronology of the game divided into separate countries or continents. It is a vastly extended and learned extension of the ‘Dates in Cricket History’, which has erratically appeared in the post-1945 editions of Wisden . The Index to Bowen’s book is a masterpiece of its kind, which encompasses both the main body of the work and the chronology. Bowen had spent a decade trying to demolish a myriad cricketing myths. In his early chapters however he creates his own theory on cricket’s origins. The idea he puts forward is that cricket began in northern France. It’s an interesting idea, but Bowen presents it as a definite fact, which is, to say the least, very misleading. The Cromwellian extermination of 17 th century cricket in Ireland, based on a single unsubstantiated quotation, is also no more than a tentative suggestion. Bowen ought to have made quite transparent that these are his thoughts and no more. As with The World of Cricket (see Chapter 13) it is very difficult to read the reviews of Bowen’s book as being objective. By 1970, through his magazine, he had split the handful of erudite cricket statisticians into two camps – pro or anti-Bowen. Perhaps the most amusing ‘review’ of Bowen’s book was in Playfair Cricket Monthly . There wasn’t one! Gordon Ross had suffered enough at the hands of Bowen, though the magazine did accept a half page advertisement for it. Neither the South African nor the New Zealand annuals reviewed the book. The new Australian Cricket Yearbook which was a magazine style production devoted a double page spread to books of the year, but merely gave a brief summary of each book’s content, with no editorial comments – the magazine’s publishers also acted as book retailers. Indian Cricket however is not so reticent. The two page review by N.S.Ramaswami commences: “This is an unusual book of a type which only a writer with encyclopaedic knowledge, enormous patience for research and certain personal beliefs could have written. It is nothing less than a history of cricket in every country in the world where a ball might have been bowled and of