The Cricketers of My Time

The Cricketers of My Time was first published in serial form by a weekly London newspaper called The Town in 1832. The following year, the series with some modifications appeared as the second part of an instructional book entitled The Young Cricketer's Tutor, which was also the title of the book's first part. There was a third part called A Few Memoranda Respecting the Progress of Cricket and that is generally referred to as the Memoranda.[2] The first edition of the full book was published by Effingham Wilson of the Royal Exchange, London in June 1833, and was reviewed by the Rev. John Mitford for The Gentleman's Magazine in July 1833.[3][4]

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The Hambledon Men

John Nyren died in 1837, but there was a second edition of the book in 1840 followed by eleven subsequent editions to 1855. These editions were retitled Nyren's Cricketers Guide.[5] A further edition, with introduction, footnotes and appendices by F. S. Ashley-Cooper, was published by Gay & Bird in 1902.[5][6] In 1907, there was another edition produced by E. V. Lucas titled The Hambledon Men.[7] Lucas' edition included Mitford's review and the interview by James Pycroft of Billy Beldham, one of Nyren's particular heroes, as well as pieces by Arthur Haygarth and Mary Russell Mitford, accompanied by Lucas's own commentary on the source material.[5][8]

In 1996, during researches for his Hambledon book The Glory Days of Cricket, Ashley Mote discovered a handwritten manuscript of The Cricketers of My Time which was signed and dated March 1833. A forensic examination was undertaken to determine the age of the manuscript and proved that it was written within a few years at most of that date, which was three months after the serial in The Town concluded and three months before the first edition of The Young Cricketer's Tutor was published. In addition, a handwriting analysis verified that neither Nyren nor Cowden Clarke wrote the manuscript, which is believed to have been the work of a professional copyist using a steel-nib pen. There are a number of differences between the serial and the manuscript, but the version in the book's first edition has only minor differences from the manuscript.[9]

In 1998, Mote published his findings in a new version of The Cricketers of My Time which compares the serial with both the manuscript and the first edition.[9]

Much of historical, social and literary value can be gleaned from Nyren's work in which his essential purpose was to provide biographical information about the players whom he knew and remembered. For the most part, they were associated with the Hambledon Club and played for Hampshire, but he also talked about cricketers from Surrey and Kent who were Hampshire's usual opponents, sometimes in the form of an All-England team. Nyren is now regarded as a key source for information about these players.[2]

The Cricketers of My Time lacks structure and is often disjointed to the extent that it resembles "a couple of old cricketers on Test Match Special reminiscing about the great players of the past".[17] Nevertheless, it remains an "extraordinarily vivid, exciting and unique book".[17] Unless new sources of information about Georgian cricket should come to light, "nothing could hope to replace the charm of the account of those great days handed down to us by John Nyren".[5] David Underdown called it "a wonderfully evocative, nostalgic account of the (Hambledon) Club's great days in the 1770s and 1780s.[18]

Harry Altham pointed out that the book was written some forty to fifty years after the zenith of Hambledon and so "it is not to be wondered at" that Nyren was often "vague as to detail and very sparing of date and place".[19] Altham calls Nyren the "Herodotus, and not the Thucydides, of cricket" and writes of Nyren's ability to "make his characters live more vividly".[19]

Rowland Bowen, often a prickly critic of other writers, described The Cricketers of My Time as "the locus classicus for late eighteenth century cricket personalities" and added that "the book is outstanding as literature".[20] Bowen was convinced that Cowden Clarke was the author and had used Nyren's spoken reminiscences as his source. Bowen wrote that "Clarke makes us hear the very sound of the old man himself talking".[21] Underdown said that it is "not important" who wrote the actual text as "in either case it originated with Nyren".[22]

Apart from the biographical information for which it is invaluable, the book contains other pieces of information that are useful and sometimes original. For example, Nyren is the first writer to mention boundaries in a cricketing context, although it meant something different then as they were parallel lines in single wicket matches used to define the limits of the outfield.[23]

A noted counterpoint in Nyren's work is his eulogy of the Hambledon era against his contempt for the roundarm era which began a few years before The Cricketers of My Time was published. Nyren made several references to roundarm as "throwing".[24] In short, he "reckoned the game had been ruined by allowing roundarm".[7] According to Altham, Nyren was one of the foremost critics of roundarm along with William Ward and Thomas Lord.[25] Altham recounts how Nyren stated in his first edition, in the section headed "Protest", that Nyren prophesied: "the elegant and scientific game of cricket will degenerate into a mere exhibition of rough, coarse horseplay!"[25][26]

Mote's 1998 edition of the book begins with an introduction in which he outlines the discovery of the manuscript and the actions that followed up to publication of the new version. In addition, he criticised Nyren's work and pointed out the plagiarism that is evident in the part called The Young Cricketer's Tutor.[27] Mote believes that Nyren included this piece to add bulk to what would otherwise have been a slim volume.[28]

There is no evidence of plagiarism in The Cricketers of My Time itself (or in the short Memoranda) which contains "such qualities of spontaneity that they might almost have been taken from dictation straight onto the page".[29]

In 1801, Thomas Boxall published Rules and Instructions for Playing at the Game of Cricket and this was "the first attempt to set laws, methods and tactics down on paper". The work, which had less than 6,000 words, was revised and reprinted several times to 1804 and was well received.[30] In 1816, the writer John Baxter published Instructions and Rules for Playing the Noble Game of Cricket under the name of William Lambert. This was also successful and was reprinted a number of times till 1828 with a further listed edition in 1832 that has been lost.[31]

Although Lambert was a top-class player in the Napoleonic period, he could not read or write and so Baxter was cricket's first "ghost writer".[27]

The Lambert/Baxter book borrowed heavily from Boxall but was longer and had a structured format. In The Young Cricketer's Tutor, Nyren blatantly copied Lambert's structure and attempted to present new content by overwriting Lambert's constructions, generally with longer sentences.[31]

Numerous Georgian players are described in the book but, as the newest version's editor has pointed out, there are several omissions including John Boorman, William Bowra, William Bullen, Robert Clifford, Samuel Colchin, John Edmeads, William Fennex and Richard Aubrey Veck; while other notable players such as Francis Booker, Robert Robinson and Thomas Scott receive only the briefest of mentions.[32]

In the following table, the page numbers given are those in the newest version of the book edited by Mote in 1998. The date published in The Town refers to the relevant sections in which each player was discussed. The essential difference between Mote's version and the original 1833 book is that Mote arranged the parts in the order that they were written: hence, The Cricketers of My Time comes first and precedes The Young Cricketer's Tutor with the Memoranda at the end.

• HS Altham, A History of Cricket, Volume 1 (to 1914), George Allen & Unwin, 1962
• John Arlott, Arlott on Cricket, Willow Books, 1984
• Barclays World of Cricket, 3rd edition (ed. E W Swanton), Willow Books, 1986. Article on the Hambledon era written by EDR Eagar.
• Derek Birley, A Social History of English Cricket, Aurum, 1999
• Rowland Bowen, Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970
• Ashley Mote, The Glory Days of Cricket, Robson, 1997
• John Nyren, The Cricketers of My Time (ed. Ashley Mote), Robson, 1998
• David Underdown, Start of Play, Allen Lane, 2000

• The complete text of Lucas's 1907 edition in Archive.org
• CricInfo – profile of John Nyren