Cricket's Historians

Ashley-Cooper, Pentelow and their Contemporaries with a blend of historical information and current statistics. Two years later Ashley-Cooper first provided the statistical section for John Wisden’s Cricketer’s Notebook . This was a diary with cricket information attached and Ashley-Cooper’s notes continued until the final issue in 1913. At the same time as providing these notes he was placed in charge of both the Births & Deaths section and the record section of the Wisden Almanack . The Births & Deaths section comprised 24 pages in 1900. Ashley-Cooper expanded it to 88 pages by 1914. As regards the Records section, this had first appeared in the 1889 edition and consisted of two pages, entitled ‘Some Cricket Records’. It was almost entirely devoted to batting – highest individual innings, highest team totals and highest partnerships, all specifically labelled where appropriate as first-class or not. The brief paragraph on bowlers simply lists some of the bowlers who have taken ten wickets in an innings. The Lillywhite Annual of 1889 in as previous editions confined its records to those achieved during the season under review. Searching for a precedent for the new Wisden record section, one is found in Spybey’s Nottinghamshire annuals commencing in the 1885 edition. This gives Notts’ records against each of the county’s opponents plus a list of hundreds for and against the county, commencing with Tom Marsden’s 227 in 1826. Spybey adopted Wisden’s Births & Deaths section in his 1879 edition. Ashley-Cooper began correcting and expanding the Wisden Record Section in 1901, when it grew to 14 pages and included for the first time, a list of County Champions, albeit from 1875. In 1906 Ashley-Cooper divided the Record Section into easily identified headed paragraphs, rather than the solid mass of type which it had been since 1889. The 1906 version ran to 23 pages. This was to set the standard which in essence remains in the almanack to this day. Ashley-Cooper’s first major publication was Gentlemen v Players , issued by Arrowsmith in 1900, though in the same year he made a very large contribution to Bettesworth’s The Walkers of Southgate . Ashley-Cooper’s principal chapter entitled ‘The Walkers on the Cricket Field’ gives in chronological sequence each match in which one or more of the Walkers 77