Cricket's Historians

A Rival for The Cricketer written by Frith. The first issue appeared in June 1979 – Frith had spent much of the 1978-79 winter in Australia covering the Ashes series. He was one of ten authors to have his account of the rubber published in book form. The general printing and layout quality of the new Wisden Cricket Monthly was more akin to the old Playfair Monthly , than to The Cricketer . Frith was also keen on the good reproduction of photographs. Historic photographs, not previously seen by the ordinary cricket reader, were to become a valuable addition as the magazine gathered momentum. It should be noted that Frith’s venture was not a partnership with the Wisden Almanack . The two were entirely separate. The ACS was also expanding its horizons and in 1978 published the first of its Australian state booklets – on Victoria. The researcher and author was Roger Page and his effort broke new ground for Australian cricket literature. ACS members, now numbering over 1,000, were being increasingly frustrated in their personal researches by the continuing rise in price on the second-hand market of the standard research tools – Wisden Almanacks pre-1900 and copies of both Haygarth’s Scores & Biographies and the magazine Cricket . The committee therefore decided to launch a series of first-class match score books, beginning with the season of 1864. The easy option would have been to simply copy the scores from the three sources named, but it was decided that newspapers and, where possible, original scorebooks should be scoured in order to add data not given in the standard cricket publications. So Robert Brooke volunteered to dig out such information as fall of wickets, close of play, toss, captains, wicketkeepers and as far as possible the correct identity of the 22 players – the lesser-known ones were often given incorrect initials, or indeed no initials in Wisden . The project was a new venture in cricket publishing – previous books had covered simply the scores of a specific club, or, of course, Test Matches. The ACS quickly discovered there was a demand for these scores (the books also included overseas match scores, some of which were very obscure). Over time the project was expanded, first, to include matches from 1801 to 1863 and then 1901 to 1914. Philip Bailey 233