Cricket's Historians

256 The Booming Market for Cricket Books confines of the actual performances on the field of play was Ric Sissons. The Players, a Social History of the Professional Cricketer published by Kingswood in 1988, deals with the contrasting fortunes of the amateurs and professionals in first-class and Test cricket throughout cricket’s history and in particular with the post-Second World War ‘shamateur’. The book was soundly researched, but rather let down by a lack of proof-reading. Sissons, who was employed in the publishing industry in Australia, had previously written Cricket and the Empire , yet another analysis of the 1932- 33 Bodyline tour. A more profound historian was Professor Derek West. A specialist in medieval French, he had spent much of his life in Canada, though a Yorkshireman by birth, and was a Professor at McMaster University in Ontario. Taking early retirement, he returned to England and began a detailed study of 19 th century English professional cricketers. The result of his researches appeared in two volumes of biographies and the history of the professional travelling elevens of the 1840 to 1880 period. The first of these books to be printed, in 1988, was The Elevens of England , which dealt with the last-mentioned subject. Rather surprisingly this was an area of cricket history that had scarcely been surveyed, though John Arlott had begun some preliminary work in the 1950s. West had then published Twelve Days of Grace , a book containing the biographies of twelve Victorian professionals; later came Six More Days of Grace – another half dozen similar biographies. The books also contained some little known illustrations, culled from the press publications of the time. Professor West died in 2002. 1987 saw the appearance of David Frith’s Pageant of Cricket . This splendid volume of pictures, arranged chronologically, tells the story of the game by both the pictures and the linked captions which accompany them. Its scope is worldwide and it is still the first port of call for anyone anxious to see the changes in appearance and dress of the players over its 250 year span. Mention has been made of Christopher Harte’s history of Australia; its publication had been preceded by two histories by the same publisher,