Cricket's Historians

A Rival for The Cricketer could be doggedly determined when he had set his stall out. He retired as Hampshire scorer at the close of the 2005 season. His son, Richard Isaacs, is also a scorer and statistician, but in the world of broadcasters. A second One Day statistician of note was Leslie Walter Hatton, who was connected with Worcestershire, but became the self-appointed keeper of the John Player Competition Records, in which capacity he reigned unchallenged. He compiled the record section for the Player League match programmes, which most counties used. A major work by Hatton was the John Player League Record Book , published by the ACS in 1987 and in a revised edition in 1993. Born in Wolverhampton in 1934, Hatton was an engineering draughtsman and a semi-professional musician. He was elected to the ACS Committee in 1978, was the driving force behind the ACS County Grounds booklets and compiled the Worcestershire edition of that series. In 1988 he took over the editorship of the ACS First-Class Counties Second Eleven Annual and his efforts to try and identify every current second eleven player as well as the compilation of a record section were legendary. In the ACS Famous Cricketers series he compiled the book on Don Kenyon. Very industrious, Hatton was a person on whose loyalty one could always depend. He died of cancer in February 2003. John Stockwell edited the Limited Overs Group Quarterly as well as being the Group’s Chairman from 1981 to 1985. He took over from Brooke as the editor of The Cricket Statistician from January 1986, but was forced to retire from the job in December 1987, and from the ACS Committee (which he had joined in 1982) due to business pressures. John Winston Stockwell was born in Weston-super-Mare in September 1947 and educated at RGS, Worcester. A chartered quantity surveyor, he is currently a construction consultant. He provided the statistics for the Gloucestershire Yearbook from 1985 to 1995 and contributed statistical appendices to a number of other publications, but his chief contribution to the ACS was probably the founding of the series of Statistical Surveys which commenced with the season 1864. These surveys continued for some twenty seasons before being superseded by the internet cricket sites. 237