Cricket's Historians

88 Some Sumptuous Volumes and County Histories bookstall. After the demise of the weekly The Cricket Field , the magazine Cricket remained the only national weekly magazine devoted to cricket. The Sportsman newspaper launched Bat, Ball and Wheel on May 5, 1898 but it survived just less than a year. As its name implies the magazine covered many sports, though the cricket element was very strong. It dealt however with current affairs and not with historical or statistical matters. The magazine Cricket therefore continued unrivalled on the weekly stage, but suffered a tragic loss and indeed a slow, painful demise with the death in February 1907 of its editor C.W.Alcock. The following notice was published under ‘Pavilion Gossip’ in the March edition: ‘The death of Mr C.W.Alcock at Brighton on Tuesday last will have occasioned much grief to all readers of ‘Cricket’, for it was he who founded this paper twenty-five years ago and had been its Editor since its inauguration. How profoundly he will be missed only those who have been intimately associated with him can adequately realise.’ There are no figures to indicate the relative sales of Cricket in 1906 compared with its first two decades, so it is impossible to discover whether the publication was already sliding downwards at the time of Alcock’s death. One small indication of a possible decline was the absence of club scores in 1906. In the 1880s and 1890s it was not uncommon for the magazine to run additional pages to accommodate these scores – clubs paid for the insertion of their matches. One also assumes that players whose names featured in these games also tended to be subscribers, or bought the magazine at bookstalls. Ashley-Cooper was appointed to succeed Alcock as editor of Cricket , presumably the ownership of the magazine was in the hands of Alcock’s widow – Alcock did not leave a will. Not the worldliest of men, Ashley- Cooper was completely the wrong person to try to run the magazine. Sales began to slip, even if they were not already doing so and the contents became less and less topical. Pentelow bought the magazine, but by 1910 the circulation had dropped to 2,400 – breakeven was roughly double that number. One of the major problems was that the daily papers gave