Cricket's Historians

258 The Booming Market for Cricket Books Owen Neely, born Wellington 1935. He played cricket for Wellington and became a Test Selector. The statistics were provided by Francis Payne, who had been appointed co-editor of the Cricket Almanack of New Zealand following the death of Arthur Carman in 1982. Payne was also the New Zealand official statistician and a scorer for Radio New Zealand. Amid these heavyweight histories appeared a very lightweight item, A History of Cricket by Benny Green. He doesn’t allow the facts to mar a good tale and the book cannot be taken seriously. Green was noted earlier for his quarrying of Wisden and editing a variety of extracts, mainly for Queen Anne Press and later Stanley Paul. He is better known as a jazz musician and broadcaster, frequently on television. Born in Leeds in December 1927, he died in 1998. A slightly more serious book is The Pictorial History of Cricket by Ashley Brown, a Cambridge graduate. Half the work is devoted to post-1945 Test Matches and the first 45 pages take the story up to 1914. There is a very large picture content, but it is not in the league of David Frith’s Pageant . Amid all these books, most of which involved the authors in no original research, John Goulstone, mentioned in Chapter 12 as a major contributor to Rowland Bowen’s The Cricket Quarterly , was publishing his own researches, both on cricket and other sports. Sports Quarterly Magazine was founded in 1977 and 20 editions were issued, the last in 1981. That publication was succeeded by Sports History which continued until 1987. Goulstone also compiled and published a number of other learned treatises. Only a rash author would go into print about 19 th century sport without consulting Goulstone’s work. Wray Vamplew, who had worked on some sports projects with Richard Cashman – Vamplew spent 18 years in Australia and was Pro-Vice- Chancellor of Flinders University – returned to England taking up a post at De Montfort University. In 1988 Cambridge University published his Pay Up and Play The Game. This volume featured professional sport in Britain from 1875 to 1914, but only 20 out of 394 pages specifically feature cricket, which seems an imbalance since until 1900 cricket was the major team sport in the eyes of the public. In 2006 Vamplew was