Cricket's Historians

Appendix One Peter Wynne-Thomas When Bowen decided to end the Cricket Quarterly , moves were made to keep it going and Wynne-Thomas was the man set to take over as its editor. At the last minute Bowen had a change of heart as he felt the CQ was too personally bound up with himself to allow it to be run by anyone else. Soon afterwards, in 1973, the Association of Cricket Statisticians was formed and, apart from a few months in 1974, Wynne-Thomas was at its heart, first as treasurer and then from July 1974 as secretary until he retired in 2006. He was deeply involved in the many ACS publishing enterprises, contributing a number of volumes himself as well as undertaking the typesetting for many of the early booklets and for years he checked, sub-edited and did the art work for these productions. From April 1977 to May 1979 Wynne-Thomas and Robert Brooke issued their own monthly magazine, Cricket News , and it was in 1979 that Wynne-Thomas became archivist at Trent Bridge, the year in which the follow-up to his first Nottinghamshire volume appeared — Nottinghamshire Cricketers 1919-1939 . He had already edited the county’s annuals from 1975 and once ensconced at Trent Bridge he became a focal point for an avalanche of queries on all things cricket; historical, statistical and trivial. In the 1980s Wynne-Thomas began a fruitful partnership with the publisher Hamlyn which saw in rapid succession England on Tour (1982), The Hamlyn A-Z of Cricket Records (1983) and The Complete History of Cricket Tours at Home and Abroad (1989) which incorporated the England on Tour material. The A-Z of records was modelled on a similar Hamlyn publication for football edited by Phil Soar who included all the Football and Scottish League tables from the start. Using this example, Wynne-Thomas gave every County Championship and Sunday League table as well as the leading averages each season from 1864, thus getting away from the standard book of cricket records which usually consisted of endless list after endless list. Instead, Wynne-Thomas also gave some background context and comment on the various records involved. Different areas were tackled with Cricket in Conflict (Newnes, 1984), written jointly with Peter Arnold, which covered various cricket rows over the years, and Give Me Arthur (Barker, 1985), a biography of the great Nottinghamshire batsman Arthur Shrewsbury which made use of the cricketer’s own diaries. However, Wynne-Thomas’ most important achievement in these years was his collaboration with Philip Bailey and Philip Thorn on the Who’s Who of Cricketers (Newnes, 1984), a 1,144-page epic which gave biographical details of all participants in British first-class cricket from 1864 as well as the most prominent 299