Twenty-One Years of the ACS

involved but all were duly researched and it remains a minor irritation that one entry was left incomplete - A.W.L.Smith,right-hand bat, died circa 1903 but his birth date so far remains unknown.Thorn has access to an incredible variety ofreference books,which,in addition to the more obvious ones,include school and university registers,service lists for the armed forces and complete sets of telephone directories for Britain and elsewhere. He also has an extensive knowledge ofwhat is available in church records and other places where births, deaths and wills are available,together with their counterparts abroad.Thorn is generous about the assistance he receives from a team of helpers and he especially mentioned Maurice Alexander, Bill Lane,Lionel King, Kit Bartlett and particularly Philip Bailey. The letters between Thorn and Bailey over the years, apparently, would rival several volumes of War and Peace in total wordage.Thorn disclaims infallibility but ACS colleagues believe the research procedures used by himself and his helpers are close to the point where if they cannot find an individual's details, neither could anyone else. Work commitments on Saturdays have prevented Thorn from attending an ACS meeting for years and he is unknown by sight to most of the present membership.He declined to provide a picture for these pages,fearing with wry humour, that the officials' photographs could end up resembling the notice board outside a remote South American police station! A minor curiosity is that Thorn is none too bothered about a cricketer's performances.'Obviously I need the "actual game"as otherwise there would be no cricketers to research but my interest in the game's statistics is limited.' One Saturday afternoon, a few weeks after the inaugural meeting, the five chosen committee members assembled in Dennis Lambert's living room in Bulkington.There was no set agenda and informality was evident as they sat in easy chairs drinking tea.The vote to form an Association had been so close that the five felt it was imperative that the newly formed body prove, before the suggested general meeting in October,that the organisation would be more than a namby-pamby affair. The one way to provide concrete evidence was to publish a'proper'(as opposed to duplicated newsletter)book.The biographical details of players and their career records were a subject of great interest to many members. What could be published on these subjects, bearing in mind a very restricted budget? No-one can remember which of the five initially said that we should try to print a booklet containing the names of cricketers from a specific county, plus some statistical record and biographical notes on each player. Having,however,reached that conclusion,the options were then looked at. Wynne-Thomas had published his volume on Notts Cricketers two years previously - clearly it was pointless repeating much of that information.