Cricket's Historians

86 Some Sumptuous Volumes and County Histories He had eleven authors writing chapters in this Country Life tome, but chose to write the chapter ‘Some Points in Cricket History’ himself. It is merely information borrowed from Nyren and Pycroft. There is a chapter entitled ‘Foreign Cricket’ which looks interesting, but is just Pelham Warner describing his overseas trips. The merit in the book lies solely in the vast number of historical illustrations. Many have not before been published in the covers of a hardback book. The titles are unfortunately often rather vague. No one of Ashley-Cooper’s calibre has been employed in this ambitious work. As has been pointed out, the editor of Imperial Cricket was Pelham Warner. Warner had, seemingly, become a cricket writer by accident. He had been educated at Rugby and Oriel College, Oxford and read law. His father was the Attorney-General of Trinidad and young Warner was born in that colony in October 1873. He had made his County debut for Middlesex in his first year at Oxford and played in 15 Tests for England between 1898-99 and 1912, being captain for ten of those games. Lord Hawke invited Warner to tour West Indies the winter he came down from Oxford and volunteered Warner to cable reports of the tour to The Sportsman . From then on Warner reported for various newspapers and later converted his reports into books. When he retired from County cricket after the 1920 season, H.A.Gwynne appointed Warner as cricket correspondent of the Morning Post , which, at that time, was considered the major national cricketing paper. From the viewpoint of the history and statistics of cricket, Warner’s role as the founding editor of The Cricketer should be considered his lasting memorial and he will therefore feature in a subsequent chapter, related to that notable magazine. Linked to Imperial Cricket must be British Sports and Sportsmen a 16 volume work, volume 5 being on cricket and football. The books were published by The Sportsman and came out in various years beginning in 1906. The cricket-football volume did not appear until 1917, Pelham Warner being the editor. The first chapter of Volume 5, is entitled ‘Old- Time Cricket’, which purports to be a history of the game to 1869, but it is very thin – the year of 1746 for the 1744 Kent v England match has not