Cricket's Historians

Test Match status is defined and Overseas Publications multiply – the tour ended in disaster with the arrest of the captain. Phillips died in California in 1915. His co-editor, H.J.Campbell was a pupil at Trinity College School and in 1876 had moved to Trinity University. He was a useful fast bowler, but unlike Phillips, Campbell was never selected to play for Canada. The annual they produced gave details of the main clubs in Canada and a handful in the States, plus the detailed scores of three 1875 international matches. The third and final appearance of the annual was in 1877. Canada did however see the production of the most extensive cricket history published outside England. Sixty Years of Canadian Cricket by John E.Hall and R.O.McCulloch, printed in Toronto in 1895, was 588 pages in length and very comprehensive. It contained a large number of portraits both of players and officials. As in other countries, 19 th century cricket literature in South Africa was largely confined to annual reports from clubs and occasional, short- lived annuals. The exception was the Natal Cricketers’ Annual , which was founded in 1884-85 and from 1888-89 continued as South African Cricketers’ Annual until it ceased in 1907. Most of the issues were edited by John Thomas Henderson, a Natal journalist, who used the pen-name ‘Cover Point’. He was born in Gateshead in 1856 and died in Durban in 1935. A useful cricketer, he appeared once for Natal in a first-class match in 1889-90. The annual began, as its original name implies, by just covering Natal club cricket, but in its later format was a substantial volume of some 200 pages, incorporating match scores, various statistics and photographs and covering all South African cricket by white players. There were no issues between 1892-93 and 1904-05. The first significant book published on cricket in India was A Chronicle of Cricket amongst Parsees and the Struggle : Polo versus Cricket . The book is undated, but was published about 1882. The first section quotes mainly from Pycroft and Box on the origins of the game, then relates how cricket began to be played by the Parsees. There then follows the story of the fight to stop polo players using and ruining the main cricket ground in Bombay. It is so eloquently described that those who wish to study the 71