Cricket's Historians

212 Bowen Bows Out he was a schoolmaster, but switched to journalism, reporting cricket and rugby for the Daily Telegraph . His articles for The Cricketer began on a regular basis in 1969. A great companion and brilliant cricket coach, he was a complete contrast to Wellings. As a balance to these ‘popular’ county histories the more serious students of the game could purchase John Shawcroft’s definitive history of Derbyshire, which was published to celebrate that county club’s centenary in 1970. The book was well researched and the details clearly laid out – Frank Peach had whetted Shawcroft’s appetite when the former gave a series of lectures on cricket in Derbyshire and then encouraged his ‘pupil’ to undertake the writing of the history. John Shawcroft was born in Derbyshire and, a journalist by profession, he was for twenty years the editor of the local weekly newspaper, Ripley and Heanor News . He wrote the historical essay on the Derbyshire County Cricket League for its 75th anniversary and the ACS book on Derbyshire County Cricket Grounds , published in 2008. In the early 1970s John Goulstone published a series of typescript works which added considerably to knowledge of the history of the game. The most extensive of these was Early Village and Club Cricket , 126 pages in length. This was a catalogue of the first known references to cricket in many of the towns and villages of England and Wales. It was laid out alphabetically, county by county. In broad terms, it contained every reference known at that time, up to 1800, but some references after that date are included. This most valuable work remains the first source for anyone doing research on local cricket. Two of Goulstone’s books of this period are directly connected with Kent – Early Kent Cricketers (1971) fills in some of the voids in the biographies contained in Lord Harris’s 1907 Kent History, but adds many new earlier Kent cricketers, whose details were hitherto unknown. Cricket in Kent (1972) includes several new match scores, biographies and cricket notices. The 1789 Tour (1972) is an oddity, in that it purports to add a great deal to the bare bones of this famous trip which is briefly noted by Haygarth in Scores & Biographies . However, unusually for Goulstone, the