Cricket's Historians

288 Historians Dig Deeper Bradman and a bibliography listing about 1,000 items missed from the two volumes in Padwick , before he issued his 628 page volume of cricket publications since 1990. It is a most ambitious undertaking and a most useful work, but he seems to have used printed listings of books, rather than the more difficult task of searching out works that, due to their limited circulation, do not find their way into dealers’ catalogues. In contrast to Gibbs’ book two authors have published bibliographies confined to a single county.MartinWilson’s book coversNorthamptonshire and Duncan Anderson’s, Nottinghamshire. These are both works that the two authors have spent almost a lifetime in compiling. It is hoped that other counties may follow their lead. Martin Wilson has produced several other specialist volumes, including An Index to Waghorn, Dawn’s Early Light (listing cricket notices in America before 1820), and An Eighteenth Century German View of Cricket , which is the republication and translation of a 1796 German book describing cricket, together with some early references to the game being played in Germany. He is heavily involved in the search for 18 th century cricket references and has in the recent past developed into perhaps the leading authority on early cricket history. His book First Cricket In… , published by Christopher Saunders in 2009, was initially based on the work of Rowland Bowen. It lists the first cricket references in each English County and then in countries throughout the world. There are many instances where Wilson has been able to update Bowen’s list and, just as important, Wilson has noted the contemporary source for the great majority of his notes, a sad omission by Bowen. He has been a frequent contributor of articles to the ACS Journal, and has unearthed the earliest-known references to cricket in, for example, Ceylon and at Oxford University. In 2010 he discovered the first ‘new’ Hambledon score since the days of Ashley-Cooper. Born in Rushden in 1964 and educated locally and at Durham University, he is a chartered accountant and author of many books on taxation. Echoes From A Golden Age was published by Boundary Books in 2010. The book was the history of the famous photographic firms in Brighton prior to the First World War, namely those run by Foster and Hawkins,