Famous Cricketers No 75 - Arthur Haygarth

Foreword By David Frith Were he alive today it is almost certain that Arthur Haygarth would be earnestly bombarding the journal of the Association of Cricket Statisticians and Historians with articles. They would embrace all manner of biographical and topographical material and oddities and corrections to scorecards, and one gets the impression that the more obscure the material the more satisfaction he would have derived from gathering it and submitting it. He did his work without cash reward. Even though he was a man of means, this dedication alone makes him and his vast and precious productions unusually appealing. He simply lived for cricket and loved the great and ever-growing web of its history which ensures its continuing appeal. Arthur was an amateur in the true sense of the word, and we really ought to regard him as the patron saint for all who have worked diligently in cricket research without receiving due recognition (as opposed to those who are well rewarded for cashing in on the time-consuming efforts of others). There is poignant evidence that Arthur Haygarth was duped by Frederick Lillywhite. Lillywhite claimed that it had been himself and his father (William, the renowned Sussex “Nonpareil” underhand bowler) who had collected all the scores for the early volumes of Scores and Biographies . But in truth it was Haygarth’s work, not theirs. He had beavered away for years and travelled far in the course of preparation of his eventual 14-part masterpiece. A truly historic copy of Volume I of S & B came my way at the 1987 auction of MCC’s “surplus” items, and I treasure it as a token of one man’s indignation at somebody’s attempt to deprive him of the credit to which he was thoroughly entitled. “All false” is Haygarth’s despairing pencilled annotation beside publisher Lillywhite’s assertion on behalf of himself and his father. “No. He had nothing whatsoever to do with it – Arthur Haygarth did the whole entirely & gratuitously.” To Lillywhite’s exaggeration concerning the “very heavy expense to which I have been put in bringing it out” Haygarth responded with another riposte: “F.Lillywhite paid nothing out of his own pocket.” And should there be any lingering doubts, beneath Lillywhite’s penned inscription to Haygarth for “the services rendered the publisher in publishing this large work” poor Arthur has pencilled: “Arthur Haygarth compiled himself the whole of the work Vols 1 to 14 inclusive”. Time appears to have brought justice to the matter. S & B is now alternatively referred to – as a matter of standard practice – as “Haygarth” and not “Fred Lillywhite’s”. So much for Haygarth the chronicler. Thanks to Roger Heavens’s further extensive efforts in respect of his hero, we now have a detailed picture of Haygarth the cricketer. At first glance he was rather a modest performer to be included in this worthy ACS series. But this particular study reaches back much further than most, to a time not only when £1 sterling could buy much but when a run was a run: that’s to say, it was a bowler’s game on crude pitches, even though he was not permitted to raise his bowling arm above shoulder height. And Mr Heavens has cleverly positioned Haygarth, season by season, in some sort of ranking. For instance, in 1857 he may have averaged only 18.07, but this was sufficient to place him third among the 131 players listed in what has been classified as first-class cricket at that time. In other words, that summer, when he turned 32 3