Cricket's Historians

A Rival for The Cricketer involved in programmes with musical connections. His second cricket book was even more obscure than the first and is mentioned at the very start of Chapter 1: Samuel Britcher – The Hidden Scorer , a 16 page booklet issued by J.R.Batten, a cricket book dealer. (it was in fact a reprint from an article published in The Journal of The Cricket Society) . This work was expanded twenty years later into a sumptuous multi-volume production in the M.C.C. Library series, published by Christopher Saunders. The new tome reprinted all of Britcher’s match score books, as well as Allen’s revised work. Also in 1982 on a better-known subject, he wrote the biography of Sir C.Aubrey Smith, the actor and cricketer. Two other writers, previously unknown in cricket book circles, had their first volumes published in 1981. Dr Michael Down was a lecturer at Nottingham University (and captain of the staff cricket team) when he researched his book Archie – the biography of A.C.MacLaren. By the time the book appeared the author was a scientist working in Pittsburgh, but in later years he returned to England and set up a business selling cricket books and publishing occasional high quality titles, including Sketches at Lord’s , which reproduced the historically important Anderson lithographs of Victorian players. In Archie , apart from detailing MacLaren’s cricketing career, which was well-known, Down dug into his not so illustrious business life which showed fecklessness and an unpleasant streak of arrogance. Down’s only other historical work was the 1985 work Is It Cricket? , a review of English cricket since 1945, with particular emphasis on the financial and political aspects. The second author is Eric Charles Midwinter, born in Manchester in February 1932 and educated at Cambridge University and at Liverpool. His book was W.G.Grace. His Life and Times. Both books were published by George Allen & Unwin, but there the similarity ends. Whilst Down concentrated on MacLaren the person, Midwinter concentrated more on the era in which Grace lived and added almost nothing to the actual life of W.G. which had not previously appeared in A.A.Thomson’s biography of 1957. Midwinter had a degree in history – Down’s degree was a scientific one – the difference shows. Midwinter went on to publish further cricket 243