Cricket's Historians

Biographies Multiply publications. These were very largely the work of Philip Bailey, but with the assistance of Sa’adi Thawfeeq in Sri Lanka and Sohel Awrangzeb in Bangladesh. In Zimbabwe however, John Ward, a long standing ACS member, provided the information at the time when he was the official statistician for that country. Whilst touching on Sri Lankan cricket mention has to be made of S.S. ‘Chandra’ Perera, who for some thirty years was the island’s principal cricket historian and statistician, as well as acting as scorer for the Sri Lankan team. In 1969 he had published Four Score & Ten , the history of the Royal v St Thomas match series. The book ran to 260 pages and gave the full scores of all the matches between the two schools as well as articles and statistics. In 1986 he published The History of the Royal College , a 602-page volume, celebrating 150 years of the school, which had a large cricket content. Perera was also responsible for numerous booklets that celebrated cricket tours to Sri Lanka, or matches on the island. It was disappointing that Sri Lanka in recent years was unable to publish an annual along the lines of S.P.Foenander’s Ceylon Cricketers’ Companion of the 1920s, since the ACS books did not venture beyond the first-class scene. A final paragraph on the ACS’s latest series. These are a sequence of biographies between 100 and 150 pages in length and feature players for whom no ‘commercial’ biography has been printed. Unlike in the ‘Famous Cricketers’ series, the actual statistical content is relegated to half a dozen, or fewer pages at the back. Those published to June 2010 include Allan Watkins and Jack Bond (Douglas Miller), Johnny Briggs (Stuart Brodkin), George Duckworth (Eric Midwinter), Ernie Jones (Bernard Whimpress), Rockley Wilson (Martin Howe), Bill Copson (Kit Bartlett), Richard Daft (Neil Jenkinson), Ernest Hayes (Keith Booth) and J.H.King (A.R.Littlewood). The editor of the series is David Jeater, who joined the ACS Committee in 2007. He had written the Famous Cricketers book on Percy Perrin, as well as a number of articles for The Cricket Statistician, in particular on first-class umpires and also first-class cricketers who were noted for their skills in ‘racket games’. He was born in 285