Cricket's Historians

The Booming Market for Cricket Books a cartoon of Disraeli. John Arlott was among the first to attempt a list of cricketers who had been featured. The Cricketers of Vanity Fair was a volume which it claimed contained full-size colour illustrations of all the cricketers. The author was Russell March. He had written occasional cricket articles for the press and in 1985 compiled a similar Vanity Fair book on jockeys. In 1983 John Player Art of Cricket was issued by Secker & Warburg in conjunction with Imperial Tobacco. The authors were Robin Simon and Alastair Smart. It was the first book to attempt a comprehensive listing and illustration of cricket paintings as a genre. However the authors warn: “It (the book) makes no claim to completeness, but it does comprise nearly all the examples of cricket art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that we have found most interesting”. Both authors had been lecturers at Nottingham University, Simon lecturing from 1972 to 1978 on the History of Art and Smart being Head of the Fine Art Department from 1956 to 1982. The book begins with a short essay on the early patrons and players and contains some minor errors. However a second essay on early pictures has great merit in that it unravels the myths with which previous writers had drowned Francis Hayman. The book contains 32 colour plates and more than 100 monochrome. 163 pictures are given their provenance and there are notes on most artists, though details of the artist featured on the front cover eluded the authors. The book’s major fault is the incomprehensible index. An exhibition of some of the paintings illustrated toured the country when the book was launched – Robin Simon expressed the view that a number of the paintings collected by Sir Jeremiah Colman were possibly ‘fakes’. This caused something of a stir at the time. With interest in cricket pictures and other artifacts related to the game, a new society was formed in October 1987, the ‘Cricket Memorabilia Society’. Don Crossley was elected as Chairman, Tony Sheldon as Secretary, Keith Hayhurst as Treasurer, Anthony Collis as newsletter 249