Cricket's Historians

The Influence of W.G.Grace 1889 contest. This rather farcical result seems to have pushed the counties into arranging a meeting to agree a points system among themselves and what was just as important, decide definitely which counties qualified to be in the top ‘league’. Apart from the eight principal counties during the 1880s – Gloucestershire, Kent, Lancashire, Middlesex, Notts, Surrey, Sussex and Yorkshire – three others had been included at times by some or all cricket publications – Derbyshire, Hampshire and Somerset. The eight were counted by the cricket press for the 1890 season, but Somerset managed to arrange enough fixtures against the top counties, to be ‘promoted’ in 1891. This classing of the top counties meant that keepers of cricket records, amateur and professional, could all compile their statistics using a standard base, at least for inter-county games. The classification of peripheral ‘first-class’ games was to remain unresolved until the 1947 season! The 1889 edition of Wisden introduces for the first time a section of cricket records, it is rather vaguely headed ‘Some Cricket Records’ and is a series of 21 brief paragraphs, but it is worth noting that a number of these paragraphs have the tag, ‘in a first-class match’ appended to them. Lillywhite’s Annual for 1889 expands its record section, entitled ‘A Few Loose Strings’ to 8 ¼ pages, but it deals only with events that occurred in 1888. Another source of cricket data and in later years informative essays on various aspects of cricket history is the county annual or yearbook. For a long time, the Shropshire Cricket Club annual which covers the seasons 1865 to 1870 has been listed as the earliest known County Cricket Club annual. It is listed in Padwick, but the compiler apparently never actually saw a copy. The archivists’ office in Shrewsbury does not possess a copy and a number of reputable cricket book dealers have been questioned but have not seen a copy for sale. The suspicion must be that, if it exists, either in six separate editions, or in a single version covering six years, the book is only in manuscript form. Gloucestershire were most fortunate to possess a publisher who was also 52