Cricket's Historians

Wisden challenges Lillywhite There was a market for the article; but as truth often lies in a well too deep for the indolent to search out, pretty stories were introduced to save such exercise.’ Charles Box retired from The Times in 1880 and then was appointed cricket editor of The Field until 1885; he died in Camberwell in July 1890 aged 84. In his chapter on the Origin and Progress of cricket, Box, though exceedingly verbose by today’s criteria, does note the 1598 reference to cricket in Guildford and the earliest overseas reference in Aleppo. He also pours doubt on John Timb’s note that Bishop Ken played cricket whilst at Winchester. In all, Box’s work is worthwhile reading for those who wish to see how the writing of cricket history was progressing. Another writer whose work deserves to be studied, but whose name, unlike Box’s does not feature in Padwick is George Moir Crauford In the 1870s he wrote perhaps half a million words on cricket’s history – certainly the Nottinghamshire section runs to 100,000 words – in his column in The Sporting Life using the pseudonym ‘Gemse’. Whilst Charles Box’s history is on the florid side, Crauford’s is solid fact. He used Haygarth’s Scores & Biographies as a general guide, but did not simply regurgitate Haygarth’s biographies. Crauford toured the country interviewing old cricketers and by doing so picked up details of players that Haygarth missed – Haygarth, as a rule of thumb, normally confined his biographies to cricketers who played at Lord’s, but Crauford in his researches dug out players from the ‘country’. Since Crauford was writing a weekly column, he also had the advantage that readers wrote in with additions and corrections and these normally appeared at the top of his following week’s piece. The umpire Robert Thoms acted as an adviser to Crauford. The latter died in London in July 1883 aged 43. A note, which appeared in Cricket regarding his death, stated that he was ‘in the War Office’, though one can hardly imagine that his journalistic work was part-time – these Victorian writers achieved so much more than their successors! A much longer-lived ‘amateur’ journalist and author was Frederick Gale (known as ‘The Old Buffer’). He would seem to be the nearest 19 th century equivalent in cricket writing terms to the 20 th century Neville Cardus. 38