Cricket's Historians

Ashley-Cooper, Pentelow and their Contemporaries Own Paper and The Captain . Pentelow apparently employed numerous pen-names when delivering his adventure stories to editors – Irving Rosenwater published a monograph on Pentelow, but he had to confess that he found it impossible to discover a complete list of pen-names used by the writer. The success of his writing allowed Pentelow to abandon teaching and become a freelance writer and journalist. In his column in Cricket Pentelow rarely strayed from current events and those of the immediate past. In the winter of 1898-99, Alcock used both Pentelow and Ashley-Cooper as columnists, but as soon as the 1899 season approached, he retained Ashley-Cooper’s ‘At The Sign Of The Wicket’ and Pentelow’s ‘Between The Innings’ disappeared. Whether or not this caused a serious rift between the two statisticians is not known. If it did then it was short lived, since a few years later they were working in harness and their friendship lasted until Pentelow’s death. Ashley-Cooper and Pentelow might be considered the principal professional cricket statistician-historians at the turn of the century, but there was still ample room for amateurs to compile and publish work. Albert C.Coxhead, born in St Pancras, London in 1847, was a tea merchant. He contributed bits and pieces fairly often in the 1890s to Cricket , then in 1899 had published Cricket Records with a Commentary , a 100-page hardback. The work consisted of a long series of progressive records, such as the highest individual innings and the highest team total, each taken from the earliest available score sheet through to 1899, in all there are no less than 78 tables of figures. He was perplexed by the problem of whether matches were or were not of first-class status and makes the following comment: ‘For a long period such an invidious distinction (between first-class and non-first-class) was not known; for another it was unauthorised and ill-defined, and of recent years, although useful and indeed necessary in appreciating the records of any one season, yet in comparing season with season, it is obviously illogical and probably often unfair.’ 80