Cricket's Historians

250 The Booming Market for Cricket Books editor and Gordon Phillips as publicity officer. Its first quarterly magazine was published in June 1988. Within a year, Keith Hayhurst had taken over as editor and he remains the leading light of the organisation, which has proved a great success. In recent years, its quarterly magazine has devoted much of its space to reports of the many cricket memorabilia auctions which are now very much a feature of cricket collectors’ lives. Keith Hayhurst effectively created the museum at Old Trafford in 1983 and was elected to the Lancashire County Cricket Club in 1988. He is also the county’s honorary historian. He was author of The Pictorial History of Lancashire County Cricket Club published in 2000. Gordon Phillips was the joint author of a book entitled The Wisden Book of Cricket Memorabilia which was published by Leonard Books three years after the Memorabilia Society was founded. The volume immediately became the textbook for anyone entering the world of cricket ‘collecting’ and was sub-divided into the various categories favoured by collectors. John Gordon Picton Phillips was born in Rhodesia in 1936 and emigrated to England in 1965. He joined The Times in 1970, retiring in 1982. He died in February 2003. His co-author was another Times employee, Marcus Williams. Educated at Oxford, he had begun his journalistic career with the Oxford Mail , before moving to The Times in 1980. He had a particular interest in postage stamps which had a cricketing connection and from 1980 to 1985 compiled a column in the Wisden Cricket Monthly on the subject. He also reported on cricket memorabilia auctions for The Cricketer during the 1980s. Williams and Phillips were the joint authors of two volumes related to The Times . The first, Double Century, was a book of cricket extracts from the newspaper and the second a book containing cricket writings from the letters column. Continuing the memorabilia theme, Glorious Innings appeared in 1987. This book compiled by Richard Bouwman featured the ‘treasures’ in the possession of Melbourne Cricket Club. At the time it was published Bouwman was Research Curator with the Australian Gallery of Sport at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. He was a graduate of Adelaide University