Cricket's Historians

Historians Dig Deeper specializing in cricketing portraits. The author was Duncan Anderson, mentioned above. He was born in Cleethorpes in 1952, educated at Oundle and is a chartered accountant by profession. The firms issued postcards of players at the end of the Victorian era through to 1914 and the book gives numerous examples of their work. A Favourit’ Game by Andrew Hignell, also ends in 1914, but has a longer time span, beginning with the earliest reference to cricket in South Wales in 1783. The author explains how the building of the railways helped to spread the game through that part of the country. Hignell also wrote Rain Stops Play, a work that analysed the effect of the climate on the first-class counties in the Championship. Hignell has written several other books on Glamorgan cricket, including the biographies of Maurice Turnbull and John Clay. Across the world, Greg Ryan compiled The Making of New Zealand Cricket 1832-1914 which followed a similar theme to Hignell’s book. Both authors dug deep into the archives and built on a great deal of original research. Greg Ryan has a history degree from Canterbury University and teaches New Zealand history. New Zealand also has its own cricket bibliography, compiled by Rob Franks and published by Christopher Saunders in 2006. Saunders has been responsible for the publication of many books of cricket scholarship in recent years and historians owe a great debt to him. Franks lists over 1,500 items, many for the first time, but a fair proportion are match programmes which usually were not included in Padwick . The United States saw the publication of The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America by Tom Melville, educated at Ripon College and the University of Wales, and a teacher by profession. The author confines American cricket before 1838 to a brief six page chapter and the story effectively stops in 1914. So the work ought to be American cricket 1838 to 1914. Given that limitation, it expands on Lester’s book of 1951, but as Martin Wilson demonstrated in Dawn’s Early Light there is still much to explore in the early history of the States. George B. Kirsch’s Baseball and Cricket: the Creation of American Team 289