Cricket's Historians

214 Chapter 15 The Formation of the Association of Cricket Statisticians The Cricket Society Newsletter for 1972 contained a note stating that R.W.Brooke and D.A.Lambert wished to form a statistical group within the Society’s Midland Branch – this branch organised Society meetings at Edgbaston during the winter months (the main society meetings were held in London). The editor of the Newsletter suggested that Brooke and Lambert liaise with the Society’s Statistical Officer, E.K.Gross. An accountant and for 25 years the Chairman of the Council of the Institute of Administrative Accountants, Ernest Kingsley Gross was born in 1902 and in the 1920s was a useful club cricketer with Acton Town C.C. He had moved to St Ives in Huntingdonshire after the Second World War and had for many years been compiling lists of cricketing feats below first-class level. In the 1960s he had embarked on a ‘statistical history of cricket’. Some of his work had been published by Bowen in The Cricket Quarterly and other pieces had appeared in the Cricket Society’s own Journal. He had been appointed Statistical Officer of the Society by default. To explain how this state of affairs occurred, one has to return to the beginnings of the Society. The Society’s main publication from its foundation had been the detailed seasonal averages for English first-class cricket. However the Annual providing the season’s statistics had ceased in 1960, because the Playfair Cricket Annual printed the identical information. The Society then decided to publish the detailed averages season by season for the inter- war years commencing with 1919. This had been one of the Society’s