Cricket's Historians

284 Biographies Multiply in trying to integrate cricketers of all races when the racist laws were rescinded in South Africa. His most important book was The History of South African Cricket Volume IV 1947-1960. In addition he wrote MCC in South Africa 1938-1939 , South Africa in International Cricket 1888-1970 and tour books covering the 1931-32 South Africans to Australia and the 1935-36 Australians in South Africa. His son has played first-class cricket for Derbyshire. Bassano died in Launceston, Tasmania in July 2001 and his books on G.A.Faulkner and on the 1922-23 tour to South Africa were published posthumously. Norman Rogers, born in Coventry in 1944, is a Sales Manager for a local company. He compiled the book on H.E.Dollery, and had previously published a biography of W.E.Hollies. A major flaw with many of the Famous Cricketers books, especially the earlier ones, was that authors frequently based their statistics on match scores printed in Wisden , even though the actual scorebooks for many of the matches were extant. Geoff Wilde, who did work from the Lancashire scorebooks for his volumes, unearthed no less than fifty differences between the scorebook and the scores printed in Wisden . If other authors had carried meticulous checking on a similar scale, perhaps the series would have continued after the 100 th book. As it was the ACS Committee decided that all the data was now on line and the books were superfluous. The ACS series on ‘counties’, having completed the first-class ‘counties’ for both the British Isles (Ireland had been compiled by Edward Liddle and Scotland by Richard Miller) and Australia, moved on to South Africa. ‘Transvaal Cricketers’ was issued in 1995, since when books on Natal, Western Province, Border and Northerns have been published. The principal compiler and researcher for all these volumes has been Robin Isherwood. With the establishment of domestic first-class cricket in Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe and later Bangladesh and the absence of cricket annuals which published detailed first-class scores in those countries, the ACS decided to fill the gap by issuing its own Sri Lankan, Zimbabwean and Bangladeshi