Cricket's Historians

298 Appendix One Peter Wynne-Thomas By Keith Warsop In a book telling the story of the historians of cricket it would be surprising if a reader was unable to find the name of Peter Wynne-Thomas who has been at the forefront of the game’s researchers for some four decades. However, with his customary modesty the author of this volume has omitted all but passing reference to himself so that the duty of covering his achievement has been deputed to a long-time colleague. Peter Wynne-Thomas was born in 1934 and educated at Lancing College in Sussex. At the age of eight he moved with his family to Nottingham and when county cricket resumed at the end of the Second World War he gravitated to Trent Bridge where he followed Nottinghamshire in the heyday of Walter Keeton, Charlie Harris, Joe Hardstaff, Harold Butler, Arthur Jepson and the young Reg Simpson. This led him to compile the players’ seasonal averages and eventually to attempt to record the doings of all Nottinghamshire cricketers, both statistical and biographical. In this task he used the best of models — Arthur Haygarth, the compiler of Scores and Biographies . Like Haygarth, Wynne-Thomas visited or sent questionnaires to old players or their descendants as well as touring cemeteries to transcribe the inscriptions on cricketers’ graves. In the 1960s both he and I were early contributors to Rowland Bowen’s Cricket Quarterly and it was through Bowen that we made contact. From the mid- 1960s I joined Wynne-Thomas in his quest for old Nottinghamshire cricketers, including the visits to graveyards, and slowly his research turned into a book — Nottinghamshire Cricketers 1821-1914 . When published in 1971 it won the Cricket Society’s “Book of the Year” award and set him on a cricket writing career which eventually pushed his professional job of architectural consultant into the background.