Cricket's Historians

The Pioneers of Cricket’s History and Statistics little narrative. As previously noted, North’s book of Nottingham scores was published as early as 1830, but in 1853 Nottingham went one step further and not only printed the scores but a 14 page history, plus 10 pages of players’ biographies. The book Nottingham Cricket Matches from 1771 to 1853 was compiled by John Frost Sutton. The Sutton family were publishers of the local newspaper Nottingham Review , which in the 1840s and 1850s gave excellent coverage to cricket. Sutton claims that, ‘Nottingham has as great pretensions to giving birth to the noble pastime (cricket) as any other locality.’ However Sutton later concedes that the Southern and South- Eastern Counties have been responsible for bringing cricket to its present state of perfection. Sutton’s brief foray into the early years of the game owe all to Strutt and Pycroft and his first hard fact for Nottingham cricket is North’s score for Nottingham v Sheffield in 1771. Sutton’s history of Nottingham cricket from that date is excellent, as are his biographies of 25 Nottingham players, then very brief notes on a further dozen or so. This work was destined to be revised and updated several times. Returning to the national scene, William Denison was succeeded as the main cricket correspondent of Bell’s Life in the late 1840s by Frederick Lillywhite, to whose enterprise the world of both historians and statisticians owes a great debt. Born in Hove in 1829, Frederick’s father was the famous Sussex cricketer of his day, Frederick William Lillywhite (1792-1854). The father was generally known as William Lillywhite. He had several sons older than Frederick, including James (born 1825) and John (born 1826). Unlike Frederick these two became notable county cricketers. The family moved to London in 1844, when William took a post on the ground staff at Lord’s. In the same year, Lillywhite’s Illustrated Handbook of Cricket was published in London and Brighton. This is essentially an instructional book and does not advance either the statistics or the knowledge of the history of the game. Of greater importance is The Young Cricketer’s Guide published twice in 1849, which was then to re-appear the next year (1850) as Lillywhite’s 22