Cricket's Historians

Some Sumptuous Volumes and County Histories been revised, this however is just one example of work written by a general sports journalist, G.E.Hopcroft, whose knowledge of cricket history was seemingly minimal. The one major feature of the 579 page book, that is still of value, is headed ‘Prominent Players’, giving biographies of some 300 amateur cricketers and footballers who flourished in the early 20 th century. Both Imperial Cricket and British Sports and Sportsmen were published in sumptuous volumes for subscribers. Another volume on a similar scale was Fifty Years of Sport at Oxford and Cambridge and the Great Public Schools , edited by A.C.M.Croome. Volume One features Athletics, Cricket and Rowing from 1861 (the book appeared in 1913). The cricket section contains the detailed scores of University matches from 1861, but is perhaps more valuable for photographs of nearly all the University Elevens. Volume Three appeared in 1922 and gave details of Eton v Harrow, Eton v Winchester and Harrow Wanderers. Arthur Croome was educated at Wellington and Oxford, gaining his cricket blue in 1888 and 1889. He played for Gloucestershire from 1885 to 1892 and his county career is famous for an incident in the match at Old Trafford in 1887, when he ran to save a boundary and impaled his neck on the spike of some metal railings. Prompt medical help from W.G.Grace saved his life. Croome became a master at Radley, but then moved to journalism, writing on cricket for The Times and golf for the Morning Post . He succeeded Sydney Pardon as the chief cricket correspondent of The Times in 1925, but died in 1930. Sir Home Gordon commented: ‘With his writings on cricket he took tremendous pains, whereas he would dash off his golf articles as fast as he could scribble them. To my mind he attained the very highest standards of cricket journalism in his daily accounts of the Test Matches…’ In retrospect it seems a pity that Croome’s cricket writing did not appear more often in hard covers. Having reviewed three large tomes that were beyond the pocket of the ordinary cricket follower, we return to the mundane area of the station 87