Collector's items
Benny Green
Wisden's Cricketers' Almanac (Sporting Handbooks £3.00) To attempt to review Wisden would be an impertinence, so I will merely record the arrival of the one hundred and thirteenth volume of the most exhaustive sociological survey ever attempted by any modern writer or group of writers, and use the occasion as the pretext for flying one of my favourite kites, in the hope that Sporting Handbooks, Ltd, who have the privilege each year of publishing Wisden, will notice my antics and not mistake them for buffoonery. But before I come to that, perhaps I should note that in the 1976 edition there are to be found a useful celebration of England-Australia Test matches over the last one hundred years, a fascinating profile of that Edwardian lion, F. R. Foster, and the text of Alan Gibson's tribute to Sir Neville Cardus at the memorial service for Cardus last year. There are also, of course a thousand pages of closely printed facts and statistics, enough to keep the looniest fanatic happy for months,
some excellent photographs, and a highly readable review of the year's cricket publications by John Arlott.
But each season when the new Wisden arrives, I find myself scurrying to my hoard of old ones, a habit which has steadily pushed me over the years to the conclusion that what we now require is a Wisden anthology incorporating all the choicest items since 1863. For there is no question that while the actual competitions proliferate, with Player following Gillette, and Benson and Hedges following Player, the ripeness which is supposed to be all has gradually melted away from the game, or at least from the game's documentation. The fact may be disputed by those who believe that statistics are what cricket is about, but there is one passage of Widsen which proves my case conclusively, and that is the Obituary section which each year records the steady procession of performers towards the Great Pavilion in the sky. In the 1976 edition, it is true that a very faint echo of the golden age may be discerned in the item recording the death of LieutenantColonel Baggallay, 'last surviving pre-First World War county captain,' of the Hon. Rupert Barrington, 'oldest living county cricketer', and of Captain Norman Vere Grace, nephew of W.G. But I miss the bouquet of Wodehousean dottiness which once graced the pages of Wisden, and which, if my plan is taken up, will dominate any representative anthology.
Among deaths for 1908, for example, I am taken by that of George Hemingway, who, 'when playing a single-wicket match against his two brothers, hit the ball into a bed of nettles; while the fieldsmen quarrelled as to who should recover it, the batsman ran about 250'. Two years later the tradition of the sporting parson was upheld by the Reverend Arthur Gray Butler, 'said to have been the only man to jump the River Cherwell', while in 1911 the art of non sequiturs reached its apogee with the information that Edward Banks was 'the grandson of the man who built London Bridge, and rode a tricycle as recently as three months before his death'. Quite another tradition, that of the nonpareil Englishman, is raised by the 1912 lists, which remind us that Thomas Arthur Fison, playing in a club match in 1879, scored 264, the mode of dismissal being 'Retired to catch a train for the Continent'.
As late as 1926, there were plentiful items of this nature, particularly the one starring a Major Edwards, who, 'in an expedition to Southern Russia, lost all his baggage except his set of Wisden, which accompanied him on all his travels'.
Without wishing to become morbid on so joyous an occasion as the appearance of a new edition of Wisden, I cannot help feeling that cricketers have an unfortunate way of meeting their ends in unusual circumstances, and sometimes a very fortunate way indeed of using their own demise as an excuse for a sporting gesture. As to methods of declaring the innings closed, I am always saddened by the item in the 1909 edition to the effect that Andrew Newell 'left home a year ago and has not been seen or heard of since'. The fate of Richard Barber, noted in 1924, was much closer to the ideal. He was 'found dead in a railway carriage at Cookham Station while on his way to umpire a match at Shoeburyness'. Then there was Captain Robert De Winton, who 'died suddenly through a fall from a hotel window in Porterville, California', and Sam Moss, who in the same season died even more suddenly 'on the railway line while walking to a match at Featherstone'.
For sheer dynastic carelessness it would be difficult to surpass the feat recorded in the 1930 edition of the Australian Arthur Gregory who, 'returning from the funeral of his nephew S. E. Gregory, fell from a tramcar'. That was the year that Mr Hadfield Farthing, 'having sent down two overs, in each of which he took a wicket, moved to his place in the slips and collapsed'. But the point about all this is that it takes more than a fatality to end a man's career. In 1914 there died Alfred Clarke, founder of the East Melbourne Club; 'a piece of turf from the club ground was lowered with the coffin, as he desired'. The Rossettian overtones of that lugubrious gesture, however, are quite eclipsed by the touching rites attending the despatch of Harry Bagshaw in 1928, who was 'buried in his umpire's coat with a cricket ball in his hand'. Sic transit gloria mundi. And what about that anthology ?
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