Cricket's Historians

Ashley-Cooper, Pentelow and their Contemporaries Despite this remark Coxhead still splits matches into first-class or non- first-class, starting with the famous 1744 Kent v England game. Coxhead quotes the correct year of the game by naming his source – Ashley- Cooper’s article in Cricket . It is rather ironic that Coxhead’s book was printed in the same year as Waghorn’s (as noted, the latter still couldn’t correctly date the game). It should be pointed out that Coxhead’s tables of statistics are fortified by some very lucid footnotes of a type which have sadly long fallen out of fashion. Unlike Wisden and other contemporaries, Coxhead has no truck with the prefix ‘Mr’ in front of amateurs’ names, he comments: ‘Doctor Grace or Mister Read somehow rings as false as Mister Spenser or Mister Milton, (Shakespeare was a professional).’ A.C.Coxhead became wealthy enough to retire from the tea trade and move to a Sussex village. In 1901 he describes his occupation on the census form as ‘author’, but according to the British Museum catalogue he was the author just one cricket volume as described and a handful of very modest works relating to music and painting. Another amateur statistician, whose cricket reputation rests largely with a single volume was John Henry Lester. His work entitled Bat v Ball was published by Boots, but financed by A.W.Shelton, a member of the Notts C.C.C. Committee and a very keen cricket historian. The majority of the book, 236 pages, was occupied with a list, batsman by batsman of every fifty scored in first-class cricket. Then followed the seasonal batting averages for all those batsmen, but only for the seasons in which they hit an individual fifty. There were also season by season bowling averages for bowlers who took 25 or more wickets in a season. The author includes Ashley-Cooper’s career records for the leading players in the Gentlemen v Players series. Births & Deaths were listed, but taken from Wisden (with acknowledgements). The Introduction was by Herbert Jewell, who has been previously noted as a member of the Cricket Reporting Agency. It was stated that the book required a sale of 10,000 copies to break even. Evidently it did not do so – no up-dated version ever appeared. Lester 81