Cricket's Historians

238 A Rival for The Cricketer Away from the ACS, an important book on a subject not previously researched in depth, was Quilt Winders and Pod Shavers published in 1979. It told the history of the major cricket bat and ball manufacturers. The author was Hugh Barty-King, a full-time industrial and social historian, who was educated at Winchester and Cambridge University, where he obtained a history degree. He has numerous non-cricket books to his name. The foreword was by Irving Rosenwater. In the same year Derek Birley’s book The Willow Wand was published, and caused some controversy. Birley wrote it in the aftermath of the Packer revolution of 1977. He rushed through three hundred years of cricket history, pointing out that those ‘in charge’, mainly the establishment at Lord’s, had been always at loggerheads with the noble peasants, who acted as the cannon-fodder of the first-class game. Such figures as Lords Harris and Hawke, Pelham Warner and poor Neville Cardus were the major culprits. The fact that cricket simply mirrors the age in which it is played never seems to have dawned on Birley and he cheerfully plucks quotations from such authors as Arthur Carr, to suit his rather dodgy arguments. Born in Yorkshire in May 1926, he was educated at Hemsworth Grammar School and Cambridge University. After various posts in education, he was appointed Deputy Director of Education for Liverpool in 1964, then moved to Ulster in 1970, eventually retiring as Vice-Chancellor of Ulster University in 1991. An abrasive, rather large man, who was determined to get his own way, he spent his retirement in Cornwall where he wrote a three volume work on sport in Britain and A Social History of English Cricket , which demonstrated that he had learnt little from the errors made in his 1979 work. Birley died in May 2002. In 2010, The Wisden Cricketer magazine named the 50 best cricket books of all time, as selected by 42 of its contributors. The fact that Birley’s 1979 book was voted no.1, can only demonstrate the paucity of historical knowledge within the magazine and its writers. Two well-known cricketers and journalists tried their hands at telling cricket’s history in a limited space in 1979. Robin Marlar was the author of The Story of Cricket for Marshall Cavendish; Trevor Bailey wrote A