Cricket's Historians

The Influence of W.G.Grace in the winter), a portrait and biography of a cricketer (one of the Australian tourists) occupied the first page; the second page was a section of the serialisation of John Nyren’s book; there were 12 pages of scores, both first-class, with reports, and local metropolitan club matches (local clubs paid for the insertion of scores); finally came the editorial and ‘Pavilion Gossip’ – Alcock being in a prime position to slant both these items, so that they were accurate and topical. In the issue which I picked at random, Alcock chides a paper called Echo both for the way it reports the Surrey v Australia game and for describing the two Surrey Reads as brothers. Alcock’s editorial in this edition is headed ‘Decadence in Cricket’. In an edition in 1883, Alcock republishes a long piece on Yorkshire Records, which first appeared in the Sheffield Telegraph . The article is very thorough, even listing the heaviest and lightest Yorkshire cricketers! In 1884, on page 348, is the following note: ‘It is not often too, that the statisticians of cricket have to record an innings….’ It would be foolhardy to suggest that this is the first reference to ‘statisticians of cricket’, but perhaps it is the first in a specific cricket paper? In the same issue of Cricket , a short article appears containing the ‘records’ in the County Championship since 1873. The author is Thomas Keyworth, who was responsible for several other pieces in the weekly during the 1880s. He was acclaimed by historians many years later as a researcher of great importance, even though so little of his work was published. Keyworth was born in Sutton-cum-Lound, Notts in 1844 and was a Congregational minister. He worked in Toxteth, Liverpool in the 1880s, but had moved to Halifax by 1901. A flavour of the growth in interest for cricket statistics is clearly shown in an 1887 item in the magazine Cricket ; a reader writes: “This is the age of statistics. I have amused myself and whiled away some hours of this winter’s evenings by ascertaining the averages of those who have figured most prominently in the Gentlemen v Players matches during 46