Cricket's Historians

The Influence of W.G.Grace eight editions from 1926 and died in post in April 1933. Herbert Edward Jewell, the correspondent who joined the named Wisden writers in 1888, was a member of Pardons Agency for 27 years. He worked also for the Morning Post and, aside from cricket, specialised in athletics. Jewell died in December 1922, aged 66. When the Pardons first took over the running of what was then an ailing annual, their initial move, no doubt to reduce costs, was to reduce the number of pages by 50, this, despite the need to cover the 1886 Australian Tour. The reduction was achieved by drastically pruning the match reports; for example all the Gloucester home game reports were cut from a full page to half that length and the report on the Gentlemen v Players game at The Oval shrank from three pages to 1 ¼ pages. The single innovation was the first- class batting and bowling tables, each split into two sections – amateurs and professionals. They are printed in order of merit, whereas Lillywhite’s Annual gives a combined amateur and professional list, but in alphabetical order. The two sets of averages more or less match, probably stemming from the same original source. Rather surprisingly Cricket does not publish a set of first-class averages at the close of the 1886 season, even though the top batting averages are printed in several issues as the 1886 season progresses. The magazine does print an irate letter from a reader complaining that no one seems to print averages to two places of decimals, but just gives the full figure plus the remainder ( Lillywhite’s Annual changes to two decimal places in their 1891 edition). Having a high profile amongst cricket followers, Charles Pardon, with his Wisden editor’s hat on, enters into the politics of the game with essays in both the 1889 and 1890 editions. He determined to establish a proper league table for the first-class counties, featuring the top eight sides, and, more in hope, a second division of the next ten counties and even a third division of the remaining counties that possessed viable County Clubs. In view of what has occurred in much more recent times, readers might find Pardon’s two essays worth revisiting. Unfortunately, for him, the points system he devised resulted in a triple tie (out of just eight teams) for the 51