Cricket's Historians

Test Match status is defined and Overseas Publications multiply written by E.V.Lucas. Lucas was at the time building up his reputation as one the great essayists of the day. A Sussex man, he had begun as a journalist on the Sussex Daily News , but had moved to Fleet Street in 1893. Cricket was just one of his many interests. From 1904 he was a member of the ‘ Punch ’ table and moved on to become Chairman of the publishers, Methuen. A Collection of some of his cricket writings are to be found in Cricket All His Life issued by Hart-Davis in 1950. Returning to Lucas’ essay on Hambledon, this simply recycles Nyren, though Lucas did visit Hambledon before writing his piece. Lucas died in 1938 aged 70 shortly after editing A Hundred Years of Trent Bridge . It is little strange that no obituary of him appeared in either The Cricketer or Wisden . However much more recently Lucas has been described as ‘a cynical man, very bitter about men and politics, also the possessor of the finest pornographic library in London.’ So the Hambledon myths received a tremendous boost by the vast sales of Ranjitsinhji’s book. In the same year as the book appeared another unusual volume was issued by the Brighton publishers, D.B.Friend & Co, the title Curiosities of Cricket . The author had combed Scores & Biographies , Cricket and many other publications, including newspapers, to list some 750 ‘Curiosities’. What was almost as important as the actual content, the author quotes the exact source for each item. The book is the basis for many of the authors who have since indulged in such compilations. J.W.McKenzie republished the work in 1978 with an Introduction by Irving Rosenwater. There was some dispute as to the authorship of the original work. Rosenwater goes through the contortions which mark many of his published researches and arrives at A.L.Ford, rather than A.J.Gaston, who had been suggested as the author by C.W.Alcock soon after the volume first appeared. Ford was the ultimate anorak cricket book collector. According to Ashley-Cooper, a typical book in Ford’s large cricket library would be indexed by Ford as follows. The title ‘A Book about Cricket’ was indexed under ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’. One wonders how large the Index was! Alfred Lawson Ford was born in 1844 and was a useful as well as very 65