The Cricket Statistician No 195

41 mostly been glad to talk freely, while there is an impressive use of email trails, verbatim transcripts of meetings and minutes that MCC usually like to keep away from prying eyes for decades. One guesses that there has been a helpful mole or two giving access to restricted papers – it is that sort of book and all the more readable for it. Douglas Miller Paddington Boy By David Frith, CricketMASH, pp444, softback, £17.99, ISBN 97894922030 5 2, e-book £15.99. ACS members can obtain a copy for £14 including postage direct from the CricketMash website by entering the letters ACS in the ‘Additional Details’ box.’ With no shortage of new cricket books each year, perhaps members should not be pressed too hard to make yet another purchase. But if Paddington Boy is even close to your short list, hasten to your book shop. David Frith may surely claim to be cricket’s foremost polymath: a decent player at Grade level still active into his sixties, a prolific author with 38 titles to his name, editor across two decades of two different magazines, a collector of memorabilia and rare films on a scale that has made a house move unthinkable – and, above all, a man who cares passionately about the game and how it should be played and reported. Moreover, as a member of the ACS, he is there for all of us, concerned with the purity of the records we build up and cherish. Frith is a Paddington boy by birth in England and by adoption in Australia, where he played for Sydney’s Paddington club after his father, disheartened by post-war Britain, had taken the family to Australia when David was eleven. During seven months of national service a chance encounter at a dance in the station’s recreation room brought the young Frith a teenage wife, his beloved Debbie, who would be at his side for 63 years and whose passing in 2019 would trigger the need to occupy his time with these memoirs. A boring clerical or sales career had loomed in Sydney and by 1964 the grass seemed greener in England for what had now become a family of five. Selling heating systems in the evenings kept the wolf from the door and made the daytime available for cricket, where hopes of a career in writing were kept alive through a little provincial reporting courtesy of Reg Hayter’s agency. There was a fee of £200 for ghosting an autobiography for John Edrich, while a prize-winning biography of AE Stoddart revealed Frith the literate researcher. His goal in life moved closer once he had found a soulmate who would remain his inspiration and friend, John Arlott. After a brief return to Australia had not worked out as hoped, it was through Arlott that the chance emerged to edit The Cricketer. Answering to EW Swanton was a challenge rather than a problem, but with the magazine’s owner, Ben Brocklehurst, Frith remained an outsider, an employee who was never to be admitted to the inner circle. When his tenure of office came messily to an end, Frith launched his own Wisden Cricket Monthly. Sheer hard work and a stronger focus on what readers wanted brought swift success, but the Wisden connection bred in-house jealousies with editors of the Almanack, and when the Getty family acquired Wisden, treating it as almost a plaything for a younger