Cricket's Historians

Cricket’s Historians Introduction The concept is a simple one – a book on how writers have portrayed the story of cricket, not only as cricket’s history itself unfolded, but as researchers constantly uncovered hitherto lost facts relating to the game. The difficulty is to decide how broad a spread of writers should be incorporated. The number of books which have been published containing the story of the game from its inception to its present worldwide compass are relatively few and the task of reviewing their contents and some comments on the authors not too arduous, but none of those books, save the very early ones, would have been at all comprehensive without the input of dozens, not to say hundreds, of historical researchers working on a much smaller remit. I do feel that those scholars should be recognised and therefore rather than concentrating on perhaps twenty or so writers and their work, I have deliberately included the work of several hundred specialists, who have made it their business to ferret out and publish the small facets of history, which welded together enable writers to give the overall pattern. Whilst reviewing this published work – in books, magazines and other documents – I have tried, not always with success, to provide a few biographical facts on the authors themselves. The pattern of an author’s life always has some bearing on the written work he, or she, produces. Writers on history in general, not specifically cricket, divide broadly into two groupings, those whose lives revolve round the dredging of old material in order to produce fresh data in their finished work and those 7