Cricket's Historians

Ashley-Cooper, Pentelow and their Contemporaries Hampshire village of Hambledon and to Hambledon alone. As records are in existence, however, which prove that organised elevens of Surrey, Sussex, Middlesex and Kent played matches many years prior to the formation of the Hambledon Club, it is difficult to see what claims the latter has to be the birthplace of cricket, or even the locality in which the game was first brought to some degree of perfection. Thus the statement that Hambledon was the Cradle of Cricket goes for nothing.’ Ashley-Cooper follows this with some detail on John Derrick and the Guildford 1598 cricket reference. He then moves to cricket being played on Clapham Common in April 1700 (a newspaper reference not in Waghorn’s Cricket Scores ). A detailed list of the 49 matches played by Surrey against England in the period 1793 to 1831 is given. The chapter as a whole adds much to the general reader’s knowledge of early cricket, a subject not really tackled since Box’s history of 1877, except by Waghorn’s notices and Ashley-Cooper’s own 1742-1751 work. Whilst no contemporary could compare with Ashley-Cooper for his depth of historical research, a rival was bent on compiling and publishing statistical work, whichmight have equalledAshley-Cooper’s in volume, had not he been so occupied with churning out ‘ripping yarns’. J.N.Pentelow’s first cricket book had predated Ashley-Cooper’s work by several years. The title was The Blues and Their Battles , published in 1893 and covering the university matches. When R.S.Holmes gave up his column in Cricket due to pressure of his ‘day job’, Pentelow took over the column, though its title switched from ‘Cricket Notches’ to ‘Between The Innings’. The first appearance of this feature came in January 1896. He had already had a series entitled ‘The Australians in England’ published by Alcock in Cricket in 1892, so Pentelow’s appearance as a regular correspondent was not a surprise to readers of the magazine. John Nix Pentelow was born in Somersham, St Ives, Huntingdonshire in 1872. He began his career as a school teacher, but had a flair for writing and whilst teaching submitted stories to such magazines as Boy’s 79