Twenty-One Years of the ACS

Robert Brooke AGM,was 'that he had strode out ofa Dickensian cricket novel.Heseemed to be a Mr Dick, a teenage Rowland Bowen and Captain Cuttle rolled into one cricketing fanatic.' Woodhouse added that as he got to know Brooke, he realised that first impressions were usually correct! Bowen needs no introduction while the Dickens concordance shows that Mr Dick was an amiable lunatic in David Copperfield;and that Captain Cuttle was a genial,old captmn inDombeyandSon much given to saying'Whenfound,make a note of. Brooke(born 1940)was in his early thirties at this time but Woodhouse's imagery was not too far off the mark. Brooke is a complex blend of mettlesome character and artistic temperament, with a strong feeling forjustice and he is a loyal friend.As !■ M a researcher he has always been an inexhaustible perfectionist and rightly intolerant of shortcomings in this respect by others. In debate he tetchy but has mellowed in V mood and beliefs over the years. A perceptive profile by Huw Richards Robert Brooke in Wisden Cricket Monthly in July, 1992, described how the nonpareil statistician came to discover there was also romance in cricket. It was a timely conversion for a man whose other fascinations in life include Mozart's music and the legends of King Arthur and his knights. As a strong minded individualist Brooke was never ideally suited to committee work and more than once he tried to shed the ACS chairmanship that he held for the first five crucial years. ACS meetings were seldom dull when Brooke was on song but without him the ACS would not have flourished as it has. Brooke has accomplished a great deal in life in spite of being aftJicted with a trying, bad stammer, a problem he specifically asked the writer to mention, Brooke believes such disadvantages can be overcome and that others might be helped to rise above their own such handicaps by his success in this respect. Meanwhile further advertisements announced that the inaugural meeting of the ACS would take place at Edgbaston on March 3, 1973, and no doubt more than one of the eminent cricket historians present was aware that the date coincided with the Ashes being regained in 1903-04. Considering how rapidly the ACS grew from the start, it was ironic that the idea was almost strangled at birth. Irving Rosenwater, already an established expert on every facet of cricket, pointed out that the proposed organisation would cut across the statistical section of the Cricket Society. After a long discussion the ACS only came into being in its own right by a solitary vote. Thirteen people favoured