Cricket's Historians

Some Sumptuous Volumes and County Histories increasing space to current cricket matters and there was also a mass of weekly local papers. Ashley-Cooper wrote his column ‘At The Sign of The Wicket’ through most issues of 1910; Pentelow’s ‘Some Chapters of Australian Cricket History’ was serialised in the winter issues; R.S.Holmes and W.A.Bettesworth were frequent contributors. P.F.Thomas (of whom more will be noted in the next chapter) wrote many articles and some pretty frightening poems. For the historian of today the contents of the magazine as a whole are quite brilliant, but the number of budding historians in 1910 interested in minutiae can almost be numbered on the fingers of one hand. Pentelow relieved Ashley-Cooper of the editorship in 1912. A letter written by Pentelow quoted in Rosenwater’s essay on Pentelow paints a grim picture: ‘I have put over £1,000 into the paper – or shall have done when I have paid off Merritt & Hatcher’s account. Every number has been a dead loss to me. I have had promises of help in hundreds. I don’t mean help in money, but in getting readers. Out of them all perhaps 50 have come to something. Those fifty are really staunch friends: but they are not numerous enough, and the continual disappointments sour me. ‘Cricket’ has a fine past – has it a future? I begin to fear not. So few seem to care. Most of the keen readers are overseas; but at best we can never hope to keep the paper going by overseas subscribers.’ The point made about keen overseas readers is certainly reflected in the contents of the paper in 1912 and 1913, many more overseas items are published, but it must have been obvious to Pentelow that they could hardly attract new readers in the British Isles. Merritt & Hatcher, the firm Pentelow owed money to, was the magazine’s printers, who had taken over in 1895 when Alcock had fallen out with W.R.Wright. At the end of 1913 a saviour presented himself, theoretically, in the guise of Archibald Campbell MacLaren, erstwhile captain of England and Lancashire. As one of the greatest of English cricketers at the turn of the 89