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Aislabie, first Secretary of the MCC. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Lord Frederick Beauclerk: avaricious, ill-tempered, hypocritical, and adept at bending the rules. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Fuller Pilch, the finest batsman of his day, and ‘single-wicket champion of England’. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      John Wisden, the founder of the Almanack and a fast round-arm bowler. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      The Scorer, by Thomas Henwood (1842). (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Alfred Mynn and Nicholas Felix before their famous single-wicket contest in 1846 for the title ‘champion of England’. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      William Clarke, the finest underarm bowler of them all, and the founder of Trent Bridge cricket ground. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Clarke’s All-England Eleven of 1847. (The Roger Mann Collection) The All-England Eleven on the move in 1851, by Nicholas Felix. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      George Parr, who succeeded Clarke as leader of Nottinghamshire and the All-England Eleven. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      The first English overseas touring team. George Parr’s men gather on deck before their 1859 voyage to North America. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      H.H. Stephenson’s English team arrives in Melbourne on Christmas Eve 1861. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Tom Hayward and Robert Carpenter, two fine Cambridgeshire batsmen of the 1860s. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Arthur Haygarth, whose Cricket Scores and Biographies is the bedrock of our knowledge of the years 1744 to 1878. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      The 1880 Australians, the first visitors to play a Test match in England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Charles Alcock, whose immense backstage contribution to cricket warrants a higher place in the mythology of the game than history has yet given him. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Alfred Shaw, who bowled the first over in Test cricket. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Edward Mills Grace, W.G.’s elder brother and one of the most formidable cricketers of his day. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      W.G. Grace poses with Harry Jupp of Surrey. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Three of the remarkable Studd brothers, two of whom played Test cricket for England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      ‘The Demon’ – Frederick Spofforth, the first of the great Australian bowlers. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      The Hon. Ivo Bligh led the English team which recovered the Ashes in Australia in 1882–83. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Lord Harris batting at Lord’s for the Lords and Commons Eleven against the touring Canadians in 1922. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      The Ideal Cricket Match, by Sir Robert Ponsonby Staples (1887). (The Roger Mann Collection)

      A.S. Wortley’s portrait of W.G. Grace. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      The Surrey batsman W. E. Roller on his way to bat at The Oval, painted by his brother George in 1883. (Reproduced by kind permission of Surrey County Cricket Club. © The Oval Cricket Ground/Wingfield Sporting Gallery/The Bridgeman Art Library)

      The noted stonewaller William Scotton. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      The formidable Lord Hawke, while captain of Yorkshire. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Arthur Shrewsbury, one of the greatest batsmen in Victorian England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Gentlemen vs Players at Lord’s (1895). (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Albert Trott, the only man to have hit a ball over the pavilion at Lord’s. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Ranjitsinhji enchanted spectators with his wristy technique, and his torrent of runs for Sussex and England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Stanley Jackson, the first man to score five centuries against Australia in England. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      The mightiest of all of cricket’s great entertainers, Gilbert ‘the Croucher’ Jessop. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Victor Trumper: the majesty of his batting left spectators awe-struck. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      William Murdoch, C.B. Fry and W.G. Grace at Crystal Palace in 1901. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Kent vs Lancashire at Canterbury by Albert Chevallier Tayler (1906). (The Roger Mann Collection)

      Sydney Barnes, regarded by many as the finest bowler of all. (The Roger Mann Collection)

      A.E.J. Collins, the Clifton College schoolboy who scored 628 not out in a house match in 1899. (The Roger Mann Collection)

       Preface

      All my life cricket has been a joy. My sister taught me the game when I was very young, and it met a need that has never gone away. She would bowl to me as I clutched a tiny bat and tried to defend the wicket chalked on our garage door. I was rather embarrassed by my sister’s tutelage until I learned that W.G. Grace had been taught under the eagle eye of his mother. That made me feel better, but not play better.

      I have only a dim recollection of those early days, and of watching the local village side whilst my father enjoyed a game of bowls. He preferred Drake’s game to Hutton’s; but I turned my back on the bowling green and my eyes to the cricket square.

      There was no coaching at my primary school, but we did play cricket. I can still relive one incident that has the power, over half a century on, to bring a hot flush of embarrassment to my face. It was a game in which for the first time I wore full whites, pads and gloves, and had my own bat. I was expected to score runs, and that made me even more nervous – caring too much rarely produces the best outcome, as I was to learn later in life. I strode to the wicket, took guard, carefully looked at the field placings, and prepared for the first ball. I played forward and felt the ball hit the middle of the bat. But the boy at first slip appealed, and the umpire/teacher squinted down the wicket, raised his forefinger theatrically and gave me out, leg before wicket. I was mortified, and without thought, stuttered, ‘But, but, I hit it!’

      Uproar ensued. ‘Out,’ snarled the umpire/teacher. ‘Out. Off’ – he was now waving his arm like a windmill – ‘Off you go.’ He was right, of course, that I should not have questioned his decision. He was not right to mutter ‘Bloody boy,’ as, head down, I walked off, shamed and burning with injustice. That teacher’s angry face is imprinted forever on my mind; it is not a happy memory. But not even he could turn me away from cricket.

      We are led to believe that our character is formed in our earliest years. I believe that. Joy and pain are at their sharpest when they are new. I remember trying to hide my deep disappointment that my parents were never able to see me play cricket. They had many reasons not to do so – chronic ill health, worry, the struggle to make modest ends meet when the week outran the money. They were old, too. When I was six my father was seventy, and my mother closer to fifty than forty. Both smoked, and their poor health was made worse by the foul habit. It would kill my mother in the end, but for many years before that, hacking coughs and shortage of breath were a daily occurrence. And they were exotics: our neighbourhood did not house many ex-trapeze artists, gauchos, jugglers, card-sharps or speciality dancers, and even as a boy I knew my parents were not to be

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