The Cricket Statistician No 195

56 some estimates). His Royal Highness was by all accounts a cricketer good enough to hold his own at club level and retained an interest in the game all through his life, gracing the role of President of MCC on two occasions and (as Sir John Major recalls) enquiring about the cricket score during official engagements. All proceeds from the sale of the book will as usual go towards the running of the Sussex Cricket Museum. Reviewcopiesof The52 (GrosvenorHousePublishing, pp306, £21.99, ISBN9781839755842) had not arrived when these reviews went to press and hence Roger Heavens’ review will appear in the Winter Journal. However, I received an advance electronic copy a couple of weeks earlier, so can provide a few early impressions. Tim Jones’s book is a study of the 52 Worcestershire first-class cricketers who did not play in the County Championship (and hence did not receive a retrospective county cap in 2005 when the club changed its policy on caps). Many of the players featured here played only one first-class match (often against one of the universities), although some played first-class cricket for other sides and one or two played for the county in one-day cricket. Some went on to greater things in other fields, none more so than Freddy Grisewood, who won fame as a BBC announcer in the 1930s. In many cases the author has spoken to his subject and the book is enlivened by memories of batting with Basil D’Oliveira or Roly Jenkins. I received a review copy of Phil Dennett’s biography of Tommy Cook, the Sussex cricketer and England footballer, shortly before these reviews went to press; a review will appear next time. Pressures of space mean that I have also had to defer a fair number of reviews. Reviews of Roy Morgan’s book on cricket in Malaysia, Cricket in a Multi-racial Society (ACS, paperback, £15), and Greg Millam’s biography of Tony Dell, And Bring the Darkness Home (Pitch Publishing, pp 224, £19.99, e-book £9.99), will appear in the Winter Journal, along with Richard Thomas’s excellent Cricketing Lives (Reaktion Press, a new biography of Billy Midwinter, the autobiography of Dennis Amiss and the latest by Vic Marks. Readers may be interested to know that Ronald Cardwell of the Cricket Publishing Company in Australia has now branched out into rugby union. The first book from the imprint The Rugby Press, The Last of his Tribe , has just been published, a biography of Eric Tweedale, who played rugby for Australia in the 1940s and recently celebrated his hundredth birthday. He was also a first-grade cricketer with the Sydney club Cumberland and played against Arthur Morris in New Guinea during the war.