Cricket's Historians

The Booming Market for Cricket Books The one major difference from the Hamlyn version was that the statistics were in a separate section from the biographies – Hamlyn combined the two. The book appeared in 1985, priced at £25. The companion volumes never appeared, but the Hamlyn book was revised and updated in 1993. The statistics in the Hamlyn book were almost entirely the work of Philip Bailey. Born in Epping in 1953, he was educated at Eltham College and Churchill College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics. At the time of the publication of the book he was employed as a computer programmer with the London Borough of Lewisham. He joined the committee of the ACS in November 1973 and apart from a six year break has served on the committee ever since, being (in 2010) easily the longest-standing member. Richard Streeton gave a profound description of Bailey in the 1993 history of the ACS: “Bailey, a quiet, retiringman, and a perfectionist by nature, would be nominated by most of his peers as possessing the most phenomenal brain for cricket statistics in the business. Bailey’s mind invariably seems more agile than anyone else’s where figures are concerned and his memory is extraordinary. He has had a hand in the majority of the statistics in ACS booklets and has also revelled in tracing birth and death certificates and other sources for previously unsuspected information.” He is certainly the outstanding cricket statistician of his generation and, in the opinion of the author, of all time. Statisticians since the 1930s had been checking the printed scores in Wisden against other sources in a piecemeal way, but Bailey set himself the task of checking all these scores against all the extant county scorebooks. From 1999 he was given the task of updating the first-class record section in Wisden and in more recent years has been the main provider of all records for the almanack. When the internet site Cricinfo began to build an historic base for all major cricket matches, Bailey left Lewisham Council to become fully involved in the Cricinfo programme. With the setting up of another cricket internet site CricketArchive, he moved to the new organisation and is constantly 247