Lives in Cricket No 21 - Walter Read

109 he is a model of what a cricketer on the field should be. Off the cricket-field, only those intimately acquainted with him can appreciate his genuine uprightness and unselfishness, and his characteristic good temper and geniality. No one invited to write an Introduction to a book written by a friend is going to be over-critical, but although there were perhaps exceptions in Read’s career to the affable equanimity that Shuter outlines here, on the whole he seems to have summed up the essence of the man. The early part of the book is an attempt to trace something of the history and development of the game, but it is mainly from secondary sources of questionable reliability and lacks academic rigour. Locating the antecedents of the game in Greece, Rome and Persia, linked with contemporary attempts to revive the ‘Olympian games’, requires, as Read admits, a suspension of disbelief, and the cartoon-type sketches of Ancient Britons playing an early version of cricket with a club for the bat, a stone for the ball and a tree for the wicket owe more to a lively imagination than historical Annals of Cricket and Short Hints on Cricket Cover of Annals of Cricket.