Cricket's Historians

A Rival for The Cricketer more ambitious – Wisden Book of County Cricke t. The publishers gave the strong impression that Martin-Jenkins was the author. In fact he only wrote a brief overview of county cricket and the great bulk of the volume was statistical – 85 pages of essay, 355 pages of records edited by Frank Warwick. The latter, described as ‘for nineteen years sports statistician for the Daily Mail , was completely out of his depth. The original idea was that a simple letter to the 17 first-class counties would result in 17 sets of comparable statistics, including career records of all county players. It was a pipe dream. The commissioning editor, Adrian Stephenson, had a meeting with Robert Brooke and myself at the eleventh hour and an effort was made to fill the gaps and unify the end product, but the result was not entirely satisfactory. At least the statistics in the main conformed to the ACS Guides. 1980 saw the publication of a new edition of The World of Cricket , now sponsored by Barclays Bank. E.W.Swanton remained the General Editor; Melford was replaced as Associate Editor by Woodcock. The cricket correspondent of The Times , John Charles Woodcock was born in Longparish, Hants, in August 1926. Educated at St Edward’s, Oxford and Trinity College, Oxford, his strength was his knowledge of the contemporary cricket scene. His books have been mainly on English Test series. He was to be appointed editor of Wisden in 1981. He now lives in retirement in his native village. The two Assistant Editors of the revised volume were Tony Winlaw, who had performed the same role for the first edition, and George Plumptre. The latter replaced Irving Rosenwater, who had moved to Australia as scorer and statistician for Packer’s TV Channel. Copinger continued as the book’s official statistician. Rosenwater of course had to be ditched because he had joined Packer’s ‘circus’, but Plumptre seemed an odd replacement. Born in 1956, educated at Radley and Cambridge, he was an expert on garden design and a regular contributor to Country Life – at various times he had links with Bonhams and Sothebys. A lecturer, author, editor and freelance journalist, he was hardly the man to seek out the quirky errors made by the dozens of contributors. 241