Cricket's Historians

222 The Formation of the Association of Cricket Statisticians scored for Bishop Auckland and in 1978 published an excellent history of that club. He is the official statistician and historian for Durham C.C.C. From the viewpoint of general credibility, the ACS was fortune to have the immediate co-operation of Roger Page. Born in London in June 1936, he had emigrated to Tasmania with his parents and had attended the University of Tasmania, qualifying as an English teacher. He played cricket for the University and indeed helped to revive its cricket club. As has been earlier noted, Page wrote the first serious history of Tasmanian cricket in 1957. In 1964 he made his first contribution to The Cricket Quarterly and the following year became Bowen’s main contact in Australia. He moved to Victoria in the 1960s and was a founding member of the Australian Cricket Society; later he joined that Society’s committee. This new Society began by issuing a quarterly typed newsletter and from 1968 a Journal which would appear at irregular intervals through the 1970s. It was centred in Melbourne, but branches sprang up in other states and in Canberra. Through Roger Page the Association of Cricket Statisticians began research on biographical data for Australian first-class cricketers using the same format as in the U.K., i.e. on a state by state basis. Again due to Roger Page the Australian membership of the ACS rose to over 100. During 1974, the ACS published its second book on county players – Worcestershire by Timothy John Neilson, who was not long out of Worcester Royal Grammar School, having been born in Nigeria in 1957. He had organized an cricket exhibition in Worcester Library, containing many items that had gathered dust in the nooks and crannies of the County Ground for years. Worcestershire had only been raised to first- class status in 1899 and therefore, likeWarwickshire, the difficult problems of match classification affected very few of their players. Soon after the Worcestershire book appeared, Neilson went off to pursue other non- cricketing matters. The ACS had decided that one county book would appear every year and in 1975 Somerset was published (the classification of early Somerset matches had recently, after some blood-letting, been decided).