Cricket's Historians

268 A Spate of County Histories Ltd. Graveney and Hughes were both Durham cricketers at the time. Hughes later went into journalism and more recently TV commentary. . The earliest source book on Durham was Fifty Years History of the Durham County Cricket Club 1882-1931 written by the then County Hon Secretary, William Bell. Of its period it was an excellent publication. In 1983, the County scorer, Brian Hunt, compiled a centenary book, building on Bell’s work. If no publisher managed a complete series of county histories, there was an appetite for histories of the County Championship, no less than three appearing in quick succession, all by authors previously noted. A History of The County Cricket Championship by Robert Brooke was issued by Guinness in 1991, to celebrate 100 Years of Championship cricket, thus avoiding the pitfalls into which Webber had tripped (see Chapter 11). This was principally a statistical work with a page devoted to each season, plus 61 pages of general records. The Illustrated History of County Cricket by Eric Midwinter, published by Kingswood, appeared the following year. The main section contains essays of about eight pages each on the individual counties and the other section is a general history. Cricket’s Champion Counties by David Lemmon, issued in 1991 by Breedon, included both the County Champions and the Counties who won One Day Competitions. Readers could also enjoy no less than three general histories of cricket – Martin-Jenkins’ Cricket – A Way of Life : The Cricketer Illustrated History of Cricket ; Cricket: An Illustrated History by David Rayvern Allen and The Wisden Illustrated History of Cricket by Vic Marks, the Somerset player. Ashley Brown’s book has previously been noted. Another angle tried by publishers was a series of Who’s Who books on a county-by-county basis. The ACS had produced its set of booklets on the subject and the Who’s Who giving every first-class cricketer had resulted. The plan with these new books was to add marginally more statistics and provide photographs of the players. The first to be published was on Warwickshire by Robert Brooke and David Goodyear. It was issued in 1989 and its main fault was the very poor quality of the photographs.