Cricket's Historians

242 A Rival for The Cricketer The layout of the new book was altered from a strictly alphabetical arrangement of subjects to a series of sections, such as ‘Biographies’, ‘International’, ‘Counties’ and so on. The colour plates of the first edition had gone, but there were numerous black and white illustrations. Whilst David Frith, in his review notes “is there a greater single reference book? I doubt it”, Robert Brooke is not so generous, his review pointing out that many of the errors in the first edition still remained, and perhaps Rosenwater might have weeded them out. The selection of names for the biographical section was biased to the modern, though many early heroes were noted in the historical text. However in the same year as the book made its appearance, The Complete Who’s Who of Test Cricketers was published. Rather surprisingly this was the first time a single work contained essays, some rather brief, on every Test player. The author, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, acknowledges the assistance of Michael Melford, Jim Coldham and Geoffrey Saulez, as well as Mervyn Shaw in Australia and Anandji Dossa in India. An odd note in the Preface states: ‘Some career figures will, for simple lack of records, never be complete, but wherever possible the figures of any players who have reached a significant number of runs, wickets or catches have been given.’ The compiler has elected only to give a year of birth (and death if appropriate) for each player, thus side-stepping the problem of finding further data such as birthplace. Perhaps he should have omitted all first- class career figures? On a more modest scale, 1981 saw the publication of the first cricket book by David Rayvern Allen. A Song for Cricket , issued by Pelham Books was, as the title implies, a history of cricketing songs. These had been particularly popular in the pre-First World War period. The author listed over 500 titles and the book runs to 219 pages with ample illustrations. Allen, who now has over 30 cricket titles to his name, was briefly a professional pianist after his National Service, but soon joined the B.B.C. where he spent the majority of his working life as a producer, often