Cricket's Historians

266 A Spate of County Histories twice a week in the daily papers. This assignment he continued until 1991. From 1984 to 1998 he was also a major figure in checking the statistics for the B&H Cricket Year under David Lemmon. He worked tirelessly for the ACS. In the ACS Famous Cricketers series Croudy compiled books on W.Rhodes, B.Mitchell, H.W.Taylor and C.Blythe. In more recent years he has travelled to the United States to research the Halifax Cup and the players involved in that competition. Working for London Transport ‘on the buses’, the tales he told of that side of his life were more amusing than the TV series devoted to the subject! Continuing the story of The Cricketer Quarterly to its conclusion, in 1986 Richard Lockwood and Andrew Longmore took over as editors from Frindall, but after two issues, Lockwood assumed sole command. The publication had lost its way and struggled to provide readers with all the overseas scores, which was its raison d’être. The magazine ceased in 2004 when The Cricketer and Wisden Cricket Monthly merged. Richard Lockwood had also been appointed Assistant Editor of The Cricketer in 1986, but moved to Bull Computers in 1990. That year he was also the compiler of The Cricketer Digest of A Season . This was a new concept, the first-class and limited overs scores for the 1990 season were combined with individual player’s match-by-match data and the book appeared several months before Wisden . The demand for pure statistics proved much less than the publishers imagined – a second edition appeared covering 1991, but the project was then abandoned. The production of this annual was linked to a computer programme devised by Gordon Vince and thus the start of the revolution that would transform cricket statistics. As the ACS series on county grounds made steady progress, a book on current grounds, substantially updating Yardley’s book of 1952 was published. TheWisden Guide to Cricket Grounds was issued by Stanley Paul in 1989. The principal author was William Ahmed Powell, born in Lahore in 1964. A graduate member of the Chartered Institute of Building, he was a member of the ACS Committee for four years during the 1990s and was also on the Cricket Memorabilia Society Committee. A major feature of the new book was the detailed plans of each current first-class ground