Cricket's Historians

252 The Booming Market for Cricket Books on the way to watch a soccer match, in February 1998, aged 59. Another ACS series that was launched at this time (it was briefly alluded to under Les Hatton’s biography) was the County Grounds series. Thus far there had been only one book that described in any detail the county grounds and this was Yardley and Kilburn’s Homes of Sport : Cricket. The book confined itself to county grounds in current use (1952). This and Meynell’s more limited volume have been noted in Chapter 10. Peebles had a book on Test Match Grounds published in 1967 and Alwyn Sampson was responsible for Grounds of Appeal , which contained the most charming sketches of county grounds, but again only those in use. The ACS plan, on a county-by-county basis, was to give the detailed history of every ground ever used by the county team in a first-class or One Day equivalent, in a given county. It was an ambitious project. The series began with Nottinghamshire in 1984 by Peter Wynne-Thomas, followed by Worcestershire in 1985. As with other ACS series the books increased in detail as the years went by. The outstanding volume in the first ten years was Howard Milton’s Kent. Milton commenced his book with the Dartford Brent ground of 1709 and the long history of county cricket in Kent meant much more detailed research than counties such as Nottinghamshire or Worcestershire. A professional librarian with the Ministry of Defence, Milton was appointed librarian to the Cricket Society in 1977 (a post he still holds) and from 1986 he took over responsibility for the Record Section in the Kent C.C.C. Yearbook (another position he still holds). He was responsible for Appendix I 1964-1984 of the History of Kent. In the ACS Famous Cricketers series, he compiled books on F.E.Woolley and Lord Cowdrey . He also wrote a separate history of the Bat & Ball Ground at Gravesend. It should be mentioned that the County Grounds series also contains photographs of each ground, or the site of each ground. Many of the photographs for the early books in the series were taken by John Featherstone. Unlike the original ACS County series, it was found impossible to maintain the publication of these County Grounds books on an annual basis and therefore 25 years on, two or three counties still remain to be researched and published – the original County