Cricket's Historians

Wisden challenges Lillywhite in 1855 and was educated at Harrow. On leaving school he joined his father’s marine insurance business, at the same time contributing articles on cricket and football to the London papers. Alcock was also an active player, both of cricket and football. He captained Wanderers to victory in the first F.A. Cup Final and played for England v Scotland in 1875. Apart from his work on the cricket annual, he was editor of the Football Annual . His biography, entitled The Father of Modern Sport , was written by Keith Booth and published in 2002. Further references to Alcock will be made in due course. Coupled with C.W.Alcock should be a second Harrovian, Robert Allan Fitzgerald. Unlike Alcock, Fitzgerald went up to Cambridge and both at school and university he had a highly successful cricketing career. He was in the Harrow side of 1852 and then won his blue in 1854 and 1856, being described as a ‘quick run getter and an excellent field’. Having entered the legal profession and become a barrister in 1860, he was appointed Secretary of M.C.C. in 1863 and remained in that post until ill-health forced him to resign in 1877. He began his cricket writing by sending reports of Quidnuncs matches to Bell’s Life and in 1866 wrote a comical tale Jerks in from Short-Leg , using the pen-name ‘Quid’. He was in addition a regular contributor to Lillywhite’s Companion , though unlike Alcock, he doesn’t seem to have taken up the editorship. In 1872 he captained the M.C.C. Team which toured North America and wrote an account of that trip, Wickets in the West . Fitzgerald died in Chorleywood, Herts in October 1881 aged 47. His obituary in Lillywhite’s Companion notes: ‘His lively temperament, good heart, and keen sense of humour rendered him generally popular, and his loss is deeply regretted by a large circle of cricketers.’ James Lillywhite’s Cricketers’ Annual was only in its third year when the proprietor of the rival ‘Green Lilly’ died – John Lillywhite’s obituary noted: ‘Frank, cheerful and generous, he made many friends, but never an enemy; and his name will be passed down to future generations of cricketers, as that of one, whose thirty years’ connection with the game, won for him the esteem of all.’ John was only 47 and judging by that 35