Famous Cricketers No 78 - Bruce Mitchell

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Brian Croudy was born on the 31st December 1936 at Balham, London. His early life was spent in Putney and he was educated at Salesian College, Battersea. After three years National Service in the R.A.F. he joined London Transport and spent the next thirty years ‘on the buses’ as they say. He took up cricket statistics for something to do in the evenings and his first purchase was Test Form at a Glance by A.A.Thomas. He joined the ACS in 1974 and after a conversation with Robert Brooke at the first AGM he spent the next ten years on the Committee. A great friend of the late Geoffrey Copinger, he took over compiling the averages for the Press Association from him in 1982 and stayed there for ten years until computers were introduced and the section moved to Leeds. He spent Saturday afternoons working on the football results service. A chance meeting with the late David Lemmon in 1982 led to seventeen years working on the Benson and Hedges Year Book until David’s death in 1998. He compiled the figures for Gerald Howat’s books on Pelham Warner and Len Hutton and produced figures for a number of David Lemmon’s biographies. He has been very active within the ACS, and has assisted Philip Bailey for a number of years with the ACS Yearbook, and has so far produced Famous Cricketers books on Colin Blythe and Wilfred Rhodes and Denis Compton with Kit Bartlett. He also provides Wisden with the County Championship figures each year. He was Statistician of the Year in 1999. He is currently writing a book on Gentlemen v Players.