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40 2: Warwickshire in 1919 Derbyshire v Warwickshire (Derby) and Warwickshire v Worcestershire (Edgbaston), August 1919 WHY AND WHO Background In both its inception and its execution, the cricket season of 1919 was unusual. Following the Armistice in November 1918, moves were rapidly made to arrange something approaching a normal season for the following summer. But there were stirrings for change. At a meeting of the Advisory County Cricket Committee (ACCC) on 16 December 1918, the counties resolved (though only by ten votes to five) to reintroduce the County Championship in 1919, and at the same time to limit county matches to two days. This decision was not universally supported. By the following February The Times was contending that it had brought about a “crisis in the cricket world”, and opined that the decisions made in December were made in haste, and would be repented at leisure: “It is scarcely an exaggeration to suggest that the many questions involved in so revolutionary a change as two-day county matches had not been considered with sufficient care ... [they] were not considered judgments, but were ill-digested and not thought out”. The Times argued that the proposed changes would lead to declining revenues but rising expenditure for the counties, and it concluded that the best approach would be to “abolish the Championship for 1919 ... [to] allow the counties to play [each other in friendlies over] two or three days, as they desired[.] You would then be able to compare the two systems side by side, in the same season, which would be an excellent guide for the future”. 34 But despite The Times ’s thundering, a further ACCC meeting on 5 February 1919 confirmed “by a large majority” the decisions to proceed with the two-day County Championship in 1919, although earlier proposals to dispense with the tea interval and to ban Saturday starts were relaxed. The way was now clear for the county secretaries to draw up a fixture list for the coming season, which they did on 6 February. However, their list was to a degree provisional, not least because of uncertainties regarding whether or not a suggested tour by an Australian Services team would go ahead. The fixtures printed in The Times on 7 February included some for the Australian Services side, but also some alternative fixtures in the event that the tour did not go ahead. On the same day The Times reported that a decision about the tour had been postponed for a month. The fixture list published a little later in Wisden is slightly different from that in The Times , and is prefaced by the remarks “The proposed tour of the 34 The quotations in this and the preceding paragraph are all from an unsigned article in The Times on 5 February 1919. However it seems highly likely that it was written by Pelham Warner, as some of its content is very similar to that of a letter of his that was printed in The Times on 28 January 1919, and moreover the writer on 5 February appeared privy to the changing views of Middlesex on the matter: Middlesex was, of course, Warner’s county.