Cricket's Historians

Some Sumptuous Volumes and County Histories compiled a slimmer volume Warwickshire as a First-Class County in 1904 . Born in Peterborough, where he was educated at the King’s School, he played for Northants as an amateur before joining Warwickshire as a professional; later he was the County coach at Edgbaston. Santall built up a very comprehensive cricket library and wrote frequent letters and articles about cricket to the press, notably these appeared in the columns of The Cricketer . He died in Bournemouth in March 1957. Of the lesser counties, the best history published prior to the First World War, rather surprisingly since the county did not aspire to ‘Minor County Championship’ status, was on Herefordshire. The author was Edwyn Anthony, a local journalist, born in Hereford in 1871. The book begins in 1836 and describes each season, including scorecards of significant matches and latterly seasonal averages. A hardback of 200 pages it is a work to be commended. It should be noted too that the Victoria County Histories contain pieces on cricket related to each specific county – their scholarship is variable. Two histories of M.C.C. were published in the early years of the 20 th century. The first, by the Sussex historian, A.D.Taylor, appeared in 1903, but in 1914 that modest volume was completely superseded by Lord’s and the M.C.C. by Lord Harris and Ashley-Cooper. E.B.V.Christian is thanked for his help obtaining the data relating to the purchasing of the three sites which the Lord’s Ground has occupied. The fact that all subsequent histories of Lord’s and the M.C.C., and there have been several, owe virtually everything to Ashley-Cooper’s meticulous research, which the 1914 volume contains, speaks for itself. A few additional facts have emerged over the last century, but that is scarcely surprising. The long standing debate regarding the founding of M.C.C. is not discussed, save for the comment that the White Conduit Club was ‘the acorn from which sprang the gigantic oak known as the M.C.C.’ Apart from the text there is a splendid array of photographs and other illustrations, portraits of almost everyone of consequence involved in the Ground and/or the M.C.C. appear. In Australia, after the closure of J.C.Davis’ annual in 1898, the individual 97