The 1951 Wisden - An Almanac for all Years

I’m proud to say that I grew up in a book-loving household. I recall loving Mum reading to me children’s classics like the Beatrix Potter series and AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh. However, while I could physically read at a very young age, it was a while before I took an interest in tackling stories myself.

Until I succumbed to the lure of Enid Blyton’s Five Go to Kirrin Island or Malcolm Saville’s Wings Over Witchend I would often be found with my head buried in an atlas or junior encyclopaedia. However, perhaps the most influential book of all was, oddly enough, Dad’s 

battered cloth-covered 1951 edition of the Wisden almanac, the cricket-lover’s bible.

Well, I’ve never attempted to conceal my ‘anorak’ credentials, but this obsession with a statistical book published ten years before my birth predated even my first forays into trainspotting. I don’t think there was any significance attached to the 1950 cricket season; perhaps it had been given as a twenty-first birthday gift. Nevertheless, once Dad first dusted off the book and showed it to me, I was hooked.

Firstly, I was amazed how a volume with such small dimensions could contain more than a thousand pages. Wow! Admittedly I paid little attention to the sizeable chunk devoted to cricket’s holy laws, but those black-and-white photos of smartly-blazered gents with huge white collars, together with scorecards for every match played in the 1950 English summer, winter tours and global domestic competitions, seemed more enthralling than anything Dickens or RL Stevenson ever wrote.

It wasn’t the prose, the short summary introducing each game, but the facts and figures which proved so absorbing. It’s hard to put my finger on the reason. It’s not as if cricket was hitherto an enigma. I would have been well aware of contemporary stars such as Garfield Sobers, John Snow and Colin Milburn. Nevertheless I devoured all the facts and figures therein. Without consulting the internet I couldn’t tell you much about, say, the 1970 season but I can happily reel off unaided long-remembered stats from two decades previously: John Dewes’ nine centuries, Roy Tattersall’s 193 wickets, Everton Weekes’ 304 not out against Cambridge University and the fact that Lancashire and Surrey finished as joint county champions.

Perhaps in retrospect, this yellow-covered publication represented not merely a random snapshot of a single year’s sport but the entire history of the game. Those fragile, wafer-thin pages contained a myriad of first-class cricket records (no one-dayers then, of course), many of which remain, and always will be, unbroken. The Wisden introduced me to names such as AP Freeman (304 wickets in a single summer), Jack Hobbs (197 career centuries) and of course the incomparable Don Bradman, whose retirement with a Test average of 99.94 would still have been fresh at the time of publication.

My youthful brain was filled with a whole new vocabulary of names and initials: DVP Wright, RN Harvey, RT Simpson, Essex spinners Peter and Ray Smith (Dad’s namesake!), Wardle, Washbrook, Fagg, Fishlock, John and James Langridge, Laker, Lindwall, Knott, Nourse, etc, etc. It was almost as if I knew all these mysterious figures from long ago, permanently attached to their 1950 tally of runs or wickets.

Except, of course, that I didn’t know them at all. It was only by talking to Dad that these old cricketers were brought to life. For example, Hampshire’s Charlie Knott had been educated at Dad’s alma mater, Taunton’s School, Doug Wright had bowled fast leg-breaks (huh? Even now, I’ve never seen anyone do that on a regular basis), the West Indian ‘Three Ws’ were so thrilling and Essex’s Trevor Bailey had been stultifyingly boring. Even Mum, too, had anecdotes of collecting autographs of Essex players when accompanying her younger, cricket-loving brothers to Valentine’s Park.

Dad could also furnish me with context to apparent oddities such as why NWD Yardley captained England when he seemed to score few runs and take just one wicket (he was amateur in an era when professionals were frowned upon) and John Goddard skippered the West Indies touring side, purely because he was white. These weren’t just dusty tales of cricket, they were social history.

For many years I would revisit this venerable edition of Wisden whether to research something or simply for pleasure. I was fascinated to discover that one or two players I had watched perform in the mid-Seventies (notably Somerset’s captain Brian Close and Middlesex spinner Fred Titmus) also had bit parts in the book.

Yet it didn’t propel me into the rarified world of Wisden collectors. The only other edition I bought (I think it was in a sale!) was that of 1985 featuring the unforgettable exploits of Viv Richards et al the previous summer. More recently, a friend bought me a limited-edition focussing on the famous 2005 Ashes season, a splendid souvenir of that series. However I could not lose myself in the wealth of contemporary stats in the way I’d done with those concerning 1950. Perhaps it was because I had scribbled down some scores and notable performances in my own diary, or that TV and the Guardian sports pages had rendered Wisden redundant.

Yet, despite many of its pages becoming loose, possibly even mislaid, it’s Dad’s old possession which I most cherish. It’s not just because, since his death in 2015, that it reminds me of him. It’s also a souvenir of a time in my pre-teens when I was developing an interest in a sport which would entertain, intrigue and engross me for five decades and counting. It’s not my sole source of inspiration – there’s no substitute for playing – but the dusty, musty 1951 Wisden was undoubtedly a factor.