Cricket's Historians

Chapter 5 Ashley-Cooper, Pentelow and their Contemporaries Whilst Frederick Gale and his many imitators were busy, as Charles Box had said ‘confusing a very few historical facts with a growing volume of fable’, there was hidden in the bowels of the British Museum, a man who was beginning the process of blasting away the clichéd mists of time. Henry Thomas Waghorn, who was born in Tunbridge Wells in April 1842, joined the Army at the age of 15, but in 1868 retired from service life to become an attendant in the British Museum Library. Twenty or so years later he had been promoted to the task of supervising the 50 staff, whose job it was to search the shelves for books requested by readers. Why did Waghorn decide to comb the 18 th century British Museum newspaper collection for cricket references? One assumes that his search began about 1888 when he had been given a supervisory role. His searches seem to have been made in the same kind of haphazard manner that characterized many of the early Egyptologists, digging up artifacts along the Nile and almost by accident stumbling over some very significant discoveries. His first batch of cricket newspaper references was published in 1899, under the title Cricket Scores, Notes &c. From 1730 to 1773 . The book was 140 pages in length. Quite frankly it shows up as the work of an uneducated, though madly enthusiastic, amateur. The newspaper references are in chronological order with a month and a year, but no precise day and no indication of the original source. There are many misprints regarding place names and surnames, due, perhaps, to poor original hand-writing or poor proof-reading. It is however easy to criticise with hindsight what was 73