Cricket's Historians

Ashley-Cooper, Pentelow and their Contemporaries his home in Tulse Hill, South London, in October 1938. Ashley-Cooper, as has been shown, knewAlcock,Waghorn andChristian, he also made friends with Arthur Haygarth. An idea of the esteem in which he held Haygarth can be gathered from a paragraph of dedication in a new edition of Nyren’s Cricketer’s Tutor , which Ashley-Cooper edited in 1902. He writes: ‘To Arthur Haygarth, Esq., in deep appreciation of his zeal and enthusiasm in compiling the whole of the Fourteen Volumes of ‘Cricket Scores and Biographies’, a labour of love to which he has devoted all his time and energy since commencing his self-imposed task whilst at Harrow School in 1842’. Up to this point in time, the writers who have been described were either amateurs, such as Haygarth, Christian, Holmes and Keyworth, or full time journalists such as Denison, Alcock, and the Pardons, the latter normally covered a variety of subjects even if they specialised in cricket. However the arrival of Ashley-Cooper saw the first cricket historian whose sole source of income came from his cricket writing, without being his own publisher – Fred Lillywhite being a prime example of the latter. The income which Ashley-Cooper was to derive from his attention to cricket’s statistics and history was never going to make him a rich man, but his total devotion to his subject made him indispensable to the rest of the cricket publishing fraternity. He appears to have corresponded with almost everyone in the field, from ‘big names’ such as Pelham Warner to, for example, Isaiah Thomas, whose fame rests on a single early guide published in Belize. Within a few years virtually every cricket publication that was worthwhile and was reliant on statistics or historical data of national or international scope needed Ashley-Cooper’s input. Having a friend and patron in C.W.Alcock, Ashley-Cooper was commissioned to provide the statistics for the Lillywhite’s Annual . It is not certain in which edition he first provided the data, but it is possibly as early as 1895. In 1898 he was firmly established in Cricket , with his weekly column, ‘At the Sign of The Wicket’. This provides the reader 76