Cricket's Historians

Historians Dig Deeper Allen, and has been responsible for the reprinting of several of the early books relating to England tours. During 2007 and 2008 there has been a spate of anguished biographies or autobiographies by present-day cricketers; with psychiatrists now a feature of Test and County squads, this is hardly a surprise. These do not however come within the remit of this present work. Other books have concentrated on events and personalities of the past fifty years or so. Stephen Chalke published his perceptive biography of Tom Cartwright in 2007 and in 2008 a collection of his own essays from the Wisden Cricketer . Gideon Haigh, a Melbourne journalist, in 1993 wrote The Cricket War which detailed the Packer Affair. Since then he has built up a reputation as a cricket historian and his biographies of W.W.Armstrong and Jack Iverson have been well received. As has previously been noted he was for a time Editor of Wisden Australia . He has also published books on Test Series involving Australia. Gideon Clifford Davidson Haigh was born in London, but raised in Geelong. He has been described as the natural successor to Neville Cardus. A more difficult research project however was Tony Laughton’s Captain of the Crowd. . This biography of Albert Craig, the Surrey Poet, was one of the outstanding ‘historical’ cricket books of the last ten years, published by Boundary Books and running to over 300 pages with many fresh illustrations. He has also published a book on the early collector A.D.Taylor. On a much larger canvas, Sir John Major, the former Prime Minister, wrote More Than AGame , which in the main describes the development of cricket from its earliest beginnings until the 1870s, but then gives a briefer description of cricket to the First World War. It is a work for the general reader, which adds no fresh facts, nor does it pose any new theories with regard to the game’s origins. The Wisden Almanack for 2009 was edited by the Sunday Telegraph cricket correspondent, Scyld Berry, who took over from Matthew Engel in 2008. The editor lists well over a hundred people who have contributed 293