Cricket's Historians

A Rival for The Cricketer books). Most cricket books were written by journalists, the income from the books being a nice ‘extra’. Even Ashley-Cooper had a regular cricket column and Rosenwater was for some years a scorer for radio or television. Checking the credits for the information in the first Pelham Cricket Year it would seem that Lemmon compiled most of it. Frank Tyson, the old England cricketer, now domiciled in Australia contributed an essay on the Australian season and Don Cameron seems to have written the small New Zealand section. If Lemmon did in fact compile the rest, it was a mammoth undertaking and relatively error-free. The one area of Wisden into which Lemmon’s book did not trespass was ‘Cricket Records’, nor did it tread on the toes of the Playfair Annual’s staple diet of potted biographies for current players. After three years, sponsorship from Benson & Hedges was secured, the page size increased, the number of photographs, including now colour spreads, also grew. Tony Lewis, the former England player and well- known broadcaster and journalist, came in as Associate Editor and Vic Isaacs’ the Hampshire scorer, is thanked for his help with the statistics. Another three years and Brian Croudy, Brian Heald and Barry McCaully receive thanks for their statistical help. By 1982, the blurb on Lemmon states that he is now the author of five cricket books, not including the Annual. That number would multiply by ten over the next two decades. Such a mass of work meant minimal original research – most of the books were either biographies or histories of some kind. Lemmon therefore relied heavily on the commonly available source material, but within that limit his books achieved reasonable accuracy. David Hector Lemmon was born in North London in April 1931. He served in the R.A.F. then joined Shell-Mex before qualifying as a teacher. He was an ebullient character, who enjoyed speaking at dinners and other functions. He had just signed off the 1999 edition of the B&H Annual when he died at home in Southend in October 1998 aged 67. Although county One Day cricket had begun in earnest with the Gillette Cup in 1963 and been reinforced by the John Player League six years 235