by John Wisden
Maintaining this integrity and promoting the Almanack were what being editor of Wisden meant to me. There was nothing egotistical about it, that’s for sure. But it was an immensely enjoyable time, thanks to the support, company and friendship of everyone involved in cricket, particularly the writers worldwide, but no less the administrators who, I see looking back, all too often bore the brunt of my Notes.
Matthew Engel (1993–2000, 2004–07)
Fallible memory suggests I took the call on the Bakelite phone we had received as a retro wedding present. It always crackled. But I was convinced I heard Graeme Wright ask if I wanted to be editor of Wisden, an idea that had never previously crossed my mind. I said yes instantly. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? I never regretted it, even when wrestling with the Minor Counties before an icy December dawn, or enduring a particularly ghastly board meeting.
The book was on the up: John Woodcock had beefed up its cricketing and literary heft; Graeme had transformed its internal systems. But I sensed there was a fascinating challenge: making sure the book kept pace with the changing game, while remaining true to itself.
That much I hope we achieved in my first term. I made a comeback because I perceived a second challenge: adjusting to the fact that, in my three-year absence, the internet had gone from novelty to necessity. This task was thwarted by decisions taken well over my head, and remains ongoing.
The title “editor of Wisden” opened doors far beyond cricket. Within the game, the job ensured my opinions were always heard and sometimes listened to; now and again they even made a difference. It gave me a seat in the Test match press box, but the freedom to slope off. More than anything, I loved wandering round the county grounds, watching, enjoying the crack, and scrawling the odd note, that just might – the next April – blossom into a Note.
Mostly, the task was internal, but I loved that too: good writers wanted to be in Wisden, and it was a joy reeling them in. There was pleasure to be had even on a micro-level. I have spent years being absurdly proud that I changed Wisden house style for numbers so that, more elegantly, we used “ten” in text instead of “10”. I have just been told by Wisden’s deputy editor, Harriet Monkhouse, that I didn’t actually do that. Having Harriet to correct my false memories was a special delight. I had a terrific team, and we laughed a lot.
Tim de Lisle (2003)
Editing Wisden meant a lot, despite, or because of, doing it only once. It meant driving a classic car, and feeling even greater respect for the engineers. (To the long-suffering permanent staff, it was probably more like an episode of Yes, Minister.) It meant receiving an email from a contributor saying, “Hope you’ve enjoyed your year of being George Lazenby.” It meant being infamous for 15 minutes, when we announced that Wisden would have its first cover photograph. To Ian Wooldridge of the Daily Mail, this was “scarcely less heretical than slapping a picture of Judas Iscariot on future editions of the Holy Bible”.
It meant standing on the shoulders of giants. John Woodcock had brought wisdom to the Almanack, Graeme Wright had widened its horizons, and Matthew Engel had added wit and waspishness. But there was still something missing. Ever since the social revolution of the 1960s, Wisden had been out of tune with the times, a curious fate for a yearbook.
We tried to make it brighter, livelier and more penetrable. We took the best section of the book, the front, and doubled it. We encouraged subscribers to order another copy for a tenner, for their son or nephew – or daughter or niece. And we made sure the cover reflected the previous year in cricket rather than just the ways of previous Wisdens.
The designer was Nigel Davies, who has done more than anyone to make cricket publishing visually literate. He left most of the furniture in place, from the stumpy stature to the funny old font. The cover star was Michael Vaughan, in a shot chosen for its joy. It was black and white, to avoid clashing with the perennial primrose. Giles Smith in the Daily Telegraph said I had tried “to bring the Almanack kicking and screaming into the 1920s”.
Scyld Berry (2008–2011)
In my four years, I tried to give cricketers more of a voice. I brought in the records of every Test player, so those of the past could be heard; and asked former players to write, when it was not the time for reporters to report; and had county players interviewed to follow them through their season. Wisden had always been strong on the what, where and when; less so on the how and why, perhaps because most editors had not played the game themselves. And I tried to do what it said on the tin, to make it a cricketers’ almanack, as well as a cricket followers’. That is how it started when John Wisden, the former Sussex professional bowler, provided a player’s view.
I also tried to make it the home of creative cricket writing by introducing longer feature articles than had been known before, insofar as the budget allowed. The revisionist assessment of Sir Donald Bradman on the centenary of his birth was the first; another the article on the 1911 All-India tour of England, the most extraordinary of all cricket tours, which took three years to come to print. And I tried to give Test cricket the primacy it deserves by commissioning eminent former players from various countries to act as selectors and pick their World XI for each year.
Many of the most interesting aspects of cricket have yet to be scientifically explained. As the batsman hits a cover-drive off a fast bowler, what goes on in his brain, because it is a physical impossibility for the untrained brain to react in time? Why do bowlers, often left-arm spinners, get the yips? So much remains to be unearthed. The Test-match game is the thing, and what the ball does is its essence.
Lawrence Booth (2012–)
I picked up my first Wisden in 1990, having just turned 15, from Blackwell’s, Broad Street, Oxford. It cost £15.50 (you’ve got to love the 50p), which probably made it the most expensive book I had ever bought. But until I’d stumbled across old copies of the Almanack in my school library a couple of years earlier – Mr Noll, the head of history who doubled up as librarian, was a cricket nut – I hadn’t even known it existed. Now I was hooked. And if anyone had told me I’d be editing the thing a couple of decades later, I’d have questioned their sanity.
The job was just too implausible to have counted as an adolescent dream and, when the possibility cropped up out of the blue, I may have kept my composure. Matthew Engel, whose editorship I had been lucky enough to work under, once compared editing Wisden to a tropical garden – so much pruning and chopping. Wonder of wonders, I’d been allowed in to smell the orchids. Thanks to Scyld Berry, the place was pristine.
What have I had to do in the first two years? Maintain the book’s exacting standards, of course, which – it turns out – does not happen overnight. But also extend its relevance beyond its pages. Our website now bears some of the strain. Facebook and Twitter play their part too; Sydney Pardon would have been a formidable tweeter.
Above all, the internet means we have to fine-tune the relationship in Wisden between words and numbers. It’s always struck me how many people think of it as a book of stats, when it contains so many interesting stories too. Changing perceptions is one task. Another is to remind myself that the age of instant comment still has room for the more considered perspective – perhaps more than ever before.
THE CRICKET REPORTING AGENCY
Boy! Copy! Telegram!
MURRAY HEDGCOCK
No celebration of 150 editions of Wisden would be complete without acknowledging the major role played in its life by the Cricket Reporting Agency. The agency were equally at home in the scullery and at high table, overseeing the Almanack’s editorial production from 1887 until 1965, and providing seven editors until 1980. They are Wisden’s unsung heroes.
Charles Pardon founded the CRA on April 17, 1880, taking with him staff from the Sporting Press Agency, which had employed him as a reporter but folded following the death a year earlier of the owner, George Kelly King. There were various homes for the new agency. The first reference in Wisden came at the end of the 1891 preface, which placed th
em at 112 Fleet Street. Later, they moved down the road to No. 85, where they were a tenant of the Press Association at Byron House, until it was demolished in 1935. The new building would be occupied by Reuters, though the CRA (and PA) – after a temporary spell round the corner at 23 St Bride Street – returned to the new premises to rent office space.
Agency reporting is traditionally factual, straightforward and reliable, qualities which were to characterise the early style of Wisden itself. But there was also a financial imperative not to waste words: the length of agency reports determined their cost, and press telegrams were not cheap. The charge was one shilling for every 75 words transmitted between 9am and 6pm, and for every 100 words between 6pm and 9am.
Press reports were originally sent from the local post office or, increasingly, from a dedicated telegraph office at the ground itself. A row of small uniformed messenger boys sat at the back of the press box, chattering animatedly as they waited to be despatched with newspaper copy on a stentorian shout of “Boy!”, “Copy!” or “Telegram!” But this was no simple task either. Wisden 1893 carried a study of facilities for journalists, written by a future editor, Stewart Caine, who described the shortcomings of some counties: “When telegraph wires were extended to the ground, no effort was made to place the press box and the telegraph office in proximity.”
Overseas scores for early Wisdens were taken initially from Australian and other newspapers, arriving in the UK many weeks or months after the games had finished. It was not until 1928-29 that a CRA staff man was sent to cover an MCC tour. The reports by Sydney Southerton, another editor-to-be, on the 4–1 defeat of Australia were well received, lively and forthright, and in 1932-33 Southerton was meant to go again. But after some debate with PA, Reuters insisted on sending their own man: Gilbert Mant, a hard-working 30-year-old Australian on the London staff, who had reported little cricket, and now kept strictly to his brief to refrain from comment.
Sixty years later, Mant wrote of his dilemma over England’s tactics. Saying he was “sickened” by Bill Woodfull’s injury in the Adelaide Test, he added: “I was in a hopeless catch-22 situation... If I showed the slightest sign of taking sides about Bodyline, or suggesting it was a threat to cricket, my reports would be censored, and I would probably be replaced. That was when I felt that Sydney Southerton should have been there instead of me. Southerton, writing under a byline, would probably have been able to speak his mind about the general atmosphere... So, reluctantly, I joined Jack Hobbs [reporting via a ghostwriter for the News Chronicle and Star] in not rocking the boat... I was to some extent leading the British public astray. It has been on my conscience ever since.” Southerton was to make a scathing attack on Bodyline, sight unseen, in his editor’s Notes in 1934, which leaves one to wonder how differently the series might have been presented to England had he, not Mant, reported from Australia.
The CRA sent journalists on tour more regularly after the war. In 1955, one of them, Reg Hayter – the agency’s chief cricket reporter – went on to launch his own agency, a high-pressure training school for many sportswriters who graduated to Fleet Street. But the CRA sent no one to South Africa in 1964-65 and – with their future in some doubt – they were taken over by PA in 1965. Terry Cooper, who was signed by the CRA in 1962, married one of the agency’s secretaries, and later reported on cricket and rugby for PA until his retirement in 1999, explained the takeover: “The penny dropped with PA – they were paying us for something they could do themselves.”
But it was the CRA editors who set the firmest stamp on the Almanack, from Charles Pardon in 1887 to Norman Preston in 1980. The only non-CRA Wisden editor in that time was Haddon Whitaker, who presided over four Almanacks during the Second World War. Pardon himself worked on only four editions, but longevity was generally a hallmark: his brother Sydney worked on 39, Caine 47, Southerton at least 32, Wilfrid Brookes 15, Hubert Preston 51 (he missed the 1916–1920 editions while on military service), and his son Norman 47. Between them, the seven CRA men edited 90 Wisdens.
Because of the influence exerted on the agency from their foundation by Charles and his two brothers, the CRA were often known simply as Pardon’s. The trio had tackled their new roles with youthful enthusiasm (Charles was 30, Sydney 25, Edgar 20), and were rewarded in 1886 when Wisden’s owner, Henry Luff, invited the CRA to compile the following year’s Almanack, with Charles as editor. So began the association that would sustain Wisden for nine decades. When Charles died, aged 40 – Edgar would die eight years later – Sydney stepped in and, over the next 35 editions, forged the Almanack’s reputation as cricket’s most authoritative voice. On his death in 1925, Wisden described him as “the man who shaped the Almanack into the publication it is today”.
The CRA also campaigned for a more satisfactory method of deciding the County Championship than simply awarding it to the team suffering fewest defeats – the method used from 1865 to 1886. The agency proposed one point for a win, and half a point for a draw. But this produced its own problems, notably in 1889, when Surrey, Lancashire and Nottinghamshire all finished on 10½. Reacting promptly, the counties and MCC devised a new system which, with adjustments, still applies today.
After the Pardons came Caine. He had been at the CRA from the word go, was close to the Pardons, and edited Wisden’s Rugby Football Almanack for the three years that it ran from 1924 to 1926. Sydney Southerton was the son of the round-arm slow bowler James Southerton, who was the oldest player to make a Test debut – at 49 years 119 days at Melbourne in 1876-77, in Test cricket’s inaugural match – and the first Test cricketer to die, a little over three years later. Sydney was working as a ship’s steward when he met Jack Blackham’s 1893 Australians aboard the Liguria en route to England. He was engaged as scorer for the tour, and Sydney Pardon, impressed by his work, employed him at the end of the season as the CRA’s statistician. Widely known as “Figure Fiend”, Southerton later became a partner, editing Wisden in 1934 and 1935. His end was sudden: at the age of 60, he collapsed and died after proposing the toast to “Cricket” at the Ferrets Club dinner at The Oval in 1935.
In fact, five of the seven CRA men to edit Wisden died while still in the job. The exceptions were Wilfrid Brookes, who resigned abruptly after the last of his four Almanacks in 1939, having overseen the major revamp of the 75th edition, and was hardly heard of again until his obituary was published in Wisden 1956; and Hubert Preston, who did not edit the first of his eight Wisdens until he was 74 – comfortably the oldest starting age for any of its editors.
The Preston dynasty had begun in 1944, when Hubert was appointed editor. He learned his trade at the Manchester Guardian’s London office and had a brief spell farming in Canada. He joined the CRA in 1895, became a partner in 1920, and did not retire until 1951. By then, the CRA had four partners: the two Prestons, plus Ebenezer Eden, who was credited in 50 Almanacks up to 1975, and Harry Gee, who worked on the 1934–1971 editions. Leslie Smith, who first contributed to Wisden in 1935, was never a partner, but played a central role. He died in 2011, aged 97.
Norman Preston, who joined the agency in 1933, succeeded his father in 1952, and would guide Wisden through 29 editions. Following Hubert’s death in 1960, Neville Cardus wrote in Wisden that he was “with [Sydney] Pardon and Stewart Caine, the most courteous and best-mannered man ever to be seen in a press box on a cricket ground”. Preston, Eden and Gee all accepted positions at PA after the merger in 1965, but when Preston retired in 1968, Wisden’s association with PA came to an end, though he continued to edit the Almanack as a freelance until his death in 1980.
Today, the contribution of the agency to cricket reporting is commemorated by the Sydney Pardon press box at The Oval. On the first floor of the new OCS Stand, opened in 2005, it houses up to 70 journalists – all heirs of the pioneers of the Cricket Reporting Agency.
Murray Hedgcock is a London-based Australian journalist who came to England in 1953, hoping to see Australia retain the Ashes. They did not – but he has remained loyal a
nd optimistic at every succeeding series.
Additional research: Christopher Lane
BEHIND THE SCENES AT WISDEN
A production in five acts
ROBERT WINDER
Wisden has endured bombing and bankruptcy – but the Almanack never missed a year. Not all its heroes have been cricketers, however, and not all have been honoured or thanked. Here are five men who, inadvertently or otherwise, helped shape Wisden.
When John Wisden died in 1884, single and childless, Henry Luff acquired his company. As well as publishing the Almanack, John Wisden & Co were primarily a sports-equipment retailer, with a shop near Leicester Square: its spirit lives on in the red tiling above a fast-food joint in Cranbourn Street. But without Luff, the book might have folded. There was keen competition (from, among others, James Lillywhite), and the 1886 edition nearly failed to come out altogether, eventually emerging in December with a sheepish apology: “Messrs John Wisden & Co desire to express their regret at the delay which has occurred in its publication – a circumstance due to the long-continued indisposition of the Compiler [the editor, George West].” Only decades later, when Wisden had grown into a collector’s item, would the importance of not skipping an edition become clear: Luff’s determination had helped preserve the continuity on which the value of the whole set depended.
Luff strengthened the sports company by making it a manufacturer, and rejuvenated the book by handing it to a new generation. The Pardon brothers ran the Cricket Reporting Agency, which placed journalists at matches to submit copy to newspapers. They were responding to the same technical advances that had played midwife to Wisden itself: wireless telegraphy and industrial-age printing. In 1887, Charles Pardon became editor; his brother Sydney, younger by five and a half years, took over in 1891, and remained until 1925. In availing himself of this fresh blood, Luff – who died in 1910 – placed the Almanack in the hands of a dynasty that turned it into an institution.