The Minor Counties Championship 1905

15 In addition, thanks are due to the late Don Ambrose , Philip Bailey , Douglas Miller , Mick Pope , Kevin Preston , David Steedman , and Peter Wynne-Thomas who have all undertaken similar roles to those in earlier publications. I wish again to acknowledge my appreciation for others who have provided information for inclusion in this book. Help has been received directly or indirectly from the staff at the British Newspaper Library at Colindale, North London, at the County Record Offices and County Libraries, and at the National Archive at Kew. As for the help provided by Michael Pearce , Colin Munford and Andrew Lowe , I cannot improve on the words used in the 1904 book. ‘The invaluable assistance [of these colleagues], who have devoted many hours of their time to reading, correcting, amending, and improving the material which makes up this publication, must be recorded as before. Without their contribution, the preparation of this booklet would have been literally impossible.’ This year Michael Pearce has taken on the responsibility of providing the ‘Statistical Record’ set out at the end of the book for those first two counties – Hertfordshire and Wiltshire – which during the 1905 season passed the landmark of playing one hundred matches in the Championship. Next, as always, I must thank Peter Griffiths of CricketArchive for embracing so admirably the stream of amendments which came his way to enhance the earier drafts. Finally, I wish to again express my appreciation to my wife Anne for allowing me to ‘disappear’ so often to work on this book. As before the responsibility for any errors in this publication rests only with me. I would welcome having any mistakes brought to my attention so the corrections can be included in the next book which will cover the 1906 season. November 2010 Tony Webb – Editor and Project Coordinator Tel 020-8998-7106 Email: webb1pn@btinternet.com Postscript – Sadly during the preparation of this book we learnt the news of Don Ambrose’s death. His passing has deprived the project of one of its leading supporters. His guidance in helping colleagues embarking on the project was invaluable. He was regularly on the telephone offering encouragement and wise counsel. He was tireless in providing copies of relevant material from his extensive library and from his own considerable original researches, and would not accept any remuneration for his efforts. He also made a number of suggestions relating to the format of the match scores that have been incorporated in the scores in this book. These included the listing of missing information and the sources covered as an integral part of the scorecards. Don recognised that the Minor Counties Championship scores produced by the project would on occasions be incomplete and that others coming to our work later would be encouraged to fill in the gaps.