Cricket's Historians

224 The Formation of the Association of Cricket Statisticians had become very dated. The picture content throughout was provided by Patrick Eagar. Leaving the English scene and reviewing early 1970s cricket publications overseas, in Australia another attempt to establish a national cricket annual, the Australian Cricket Yearbook, was attempted in 1970 with Eric Beecher as editor. He had founded Australian Cricket in November 1968, which was published six times a year. Magazine in style, the first edition of the annual had 138 pages. There were full Sheffield Shield match scores and full coverage of Australian major overseas tours as well as a good coverage of club cricket throughout the country. David Roylance was the principal statistician. The second edition included a Who’s Who of current Australian players. Phil Tressider took over as editor in 1974 (he also took over editorship of the magazine Australian Cricket ) – Phillip Lyle Tressider was born in Kensington, New South Wales in September 1928. He was a sporting journalist based in Sydney and had been educated at the Boys High School there. He died at Randwick on October 19, 2003. The publication changed its title to the Australian Cricket Annual in 1979. An Australian journalist who was to publish a number of hardback books on cricket history was Jack Ernest Pollard, born Campsie, New South Wales in July 1926. He was the editor of Cricket: The Australian Way in 1961, but a much revised second edition appeared in 1968. This was broadly a coaching book, though Arthur Mailey provided some biographical sketches. Pollard had also written or edited books on tennis, rugby league, surfing and shooting, as well as a novel. In 1964 he edited Six and Out which was a collection of essays on many aspects of cricket by mainly notable Test cricketers. In 1971 came Bumpers, Bosey, Brickbats , which described controversies and oddities in the game. He had been based in London from 1947 to 1956, but then moved back to Australia, working for the Sydney Telegraph . His series of books on the history of Australian cricket appeared in the 1980s and will be noted later. Pollard died in May 2002. An Illustrated History of Australian Cricket written by R.S.Whitington was published in 1974. A talented first-class cricketer, he was a journalist